Demarcating between centres, peripheries and semi-peripheries has always been a challenging task and topic of scholarly debate. Layers of complexity are added when one writes about centres and peripheries of knowledge production. This paper argues that much of this complexity stems from the conflation of two approaches: Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system analysis and Joseph Ben-David’s strongly anti-Marxist sociology of science. First, the paper presents the causes of their ostensible similarity, contextualising the relations of both sociologists with US informal imperialism, which motivated them to outflank each other, rather than attack each other openly. The paper then shows that both Wallerstein and Ben-David describe historical geopolitical inequalities, changes in the position of the centre, and the possibility of multiple centres. However, Ben-David conceptualised centres and peripheries of science as competition without end, ruled by scientific universalism. For Wallerstein, academia plays a supplementary role to the economic system, with universities as places of constant social struggle, and the universalism of science entering a deep crisis. By conducting this detailed comparison, the paper sheds light on substantial differences between Wallerstein’s and Ben-David’s approaches and shows how influential contemporary sociological works either conflate them or outflank world-system analysis by undermining its Marxist roots.
The globalization of platform work has had variegated effects on working conditions. However, the dichotomy between formal employment and informal economic activities still dominates academic research and policymaking. This division reiterates a colonial matrix of thought by taking the formal employment regime as developed during the 20th century in the Global North as a worldwide standard, while grouping together multifarious working conditions in the Global South under the negative container concept of “in-formal work.” We use the Weberian methodology of ideal-type construction to positively characterize the variegated informalities of platform work while respecting its heterogeneity. We describe three ideal-types for informal working conditions in platform-mediated transportation: in Argentina, platform work functions as an income-driven safety net for workers left behind by the formal labor market; in Indonesia, platforms are forces of selective (in)formalization that apply or lift formal work arrangements depending on strategic interactions with other stakeholders; in Kenya, debt-fueled informality gets workers trapped in debt to engage in platform work.
The ongoing wave of consolidation and digital transformation in the Mumbai-based media and entertainment sector, the heart of Hindi cultural production, has brought about an unparalleled alignment of interests between media and big tech. As a result, the sector has begun to assume a bifurcated structure, comprising a limited set of major incumbents and a substantial population of smaller entities, with a gradual erosion of the culturally significant middle segment. Creative work has become more casualised and compensation lower even as the sector’s overall revenues expand. Drawing on interactions with creative workers in the sector, this article seeks to map the broad contours of the digital disruption – market concentration, big tech governance of the creative sector, the resultant crisis of production as reflected in the emerging micro-drama space, and creative workers’ articulation of the issues – and foreground the social and cultural costs of rapid and largely unchecked consolidation and digitisation.
