This paper offers a digital labor platform (DLP) perspective on workers’ ‘algoactivism’. Specifically, we examine how platforms react to algoactivist acts, and offer a structured framework, centered around the three reaction stages of noticing, framing, and acting. We identify key determinants for each stage, enabling a deeper understanding of why platforms may react differently towards various acts, and highlight temporal interdependence between these stages. Our study underlines the negotiated nature of algorithmic management (AM), illustrating how algoactivism typically stems from workers’ interpretive flexibility, involving them in a co-creation process. This, in turn, reshapes or triggers new AM practices, creating a recursive cycle that magnifies and expands it managerial scope. This interplay is best understood by viewing DLPs as socio-technical systems, composed of interdependent social and technical subsystems that recursively influence one another. We enrich the conceptualization of the duality of AM, theorizing that it is not only shaped by the platform-worker dynamic but also by the complex multi-actor work environment of DLPs.
