Event overview
Dr. Gulay Guzel (Assistant Professor at Bucknell University)
Abstract
This study examines how affective labor becomes a productive force in sustaining platform functionality, drawing on Marxist theorization of value, affect, and immaterial labor. Using a multi-actor qualitative study of food-delivery platforms, we show that consumers routinely repair interactional breakdowns, manage tensions, and generate affective stability to compensate for the limits of algorithmic coordination. These affective interventions, such as apologizing, absorbing frustration, recalibrating expectations, performing empathy toward drivers and restaurants, and humanizing otherwise datafied interactions, constitute forms of affective labor that sustain system flow and keep transactions operable.
Rather than acting as passive users, consumers operate as affective prosumers whose emotional energies maintain and reproduce the platform’s infrastructure. Their efforts not only stabilize individual service encounters but also circulate affective currencies including trust, patience, gratitude, and forgiveness that platforms rely on yet do not produce themselves.
We reposition the affective work that consumers perform as a central, yet largely invisible, form of value production in platform capitalism, demonstrating that platform sustainability depends not solely on algorithmic efficiency or gig-worker labor but also on the ongoing affective labor performed across all platform actors, from delivery workers to end-consumers, to hold the system together.
Speaker
Dr Gulay Guzel is an Assistant Professor of Markets, Innovation and Design at the Freeman College of Management, Bucknell University (USA). She earned her Ph.D. in Marketing from York University (Toronto, Canada). Her research examines consumer culture, digital platforms, and influencer marketing, with a particular focus on how markets shape identity and social relationships in relation to inequality structures such as social class, race, and gender. She studies topics including depersonalization in platform economies, the evolving role of influencers in the cosmetics industry, and the design of belonging in higher education. Methodologically, she draws on ethnography, interviews, and media analysis to investigate these dynamics. Her current projects explore how transactional logics of multi-actor platforms reshape consumer subjectivity and how influencer practices operate as conduits of innovation within established markets.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Feb 2026 | 3:00pm - 4:00pm |
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