Using Stakeholder Theory to Examine Drivers' Stake in Uber

ABSTRACT

Uber is a ride-sharing platform that is part of the 'gig-economy,' where the platform supports and coordinates a labor market in which there are a large number of ephemeral, piecemeal jobs. Despite numerous efforts to understand the impacts of these platforms and their algorithms on Uber drivers, how to better serve and support drivers with these platforms remains an open challenge. In this paper, we frame Uber through the lens of Stakeholder Theory to highlight drivers' position in the workplace, which helps inform the design of a more ethical and effective platform. To this end, we analyzed Uber drivers' forum discussions about their lived experiences of working with the Uber platform. We identify and discuss the impact of the stakes that drivers have in relation to both the Uber corporation and their passengers, and look at how these stakes impact both the platform and drivers' practices.

References

1. 2017a. Stakeholder. (2017). https: //www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stakeholder
2. 2017b. Stockholder. (2017). https: //www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stakeholder
3. Frank W Abrams. 1951. Management's responsibilities in a complex world. Harvard Business Review 29, 3 (1951), 29--34.
4. Russell L Ackoff. 1981. Creating the corporate future: Plan or be planned for. University of Texas Press.
5. Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Nicola J. Bidwell, Himanshu Zade, Srihari H. Muralidhar, Anupama Dhareshwar, Baneen Karachiwala, Cedrick N. Tandong, and Jacki O'Neill. 2016. Peer-to-peer in the Workplace. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference (CHI '16). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 5063--5075.
6. Abbass F Alkhafaji. 1989. A stakeholder approach to corporate governance: Managing in a dynamic environment. Praeger Pub Text.
7. Ali Alkhatib, Michael S. Bernstein, and Margaret Levi. 2017. Examining Crowd Work and Gig Work Through The Historical Lens of Piecework. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4599--4616.
8. Silvia Ayuso, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, and Joan Enric Ricart. 2006. Using stakeholder dialogue as a source for new ideas: a dynamic capability underlying sustainable innovation. Corporate Governance: The international journal of business in society 6, 4 (2006), 475--490.
9. David Bevan and Patricia Werhane. 2010. Stakeholder theorising and the corporate-centric world. Management & Avenir 3 (2010), 127--141.
10. Brian K Burton and Craig P Dunn. 1996. Feminist ethics as moral grounding for stakeholder theory. Business ethics quarterly (1996), 133--147.
11. Chris Callison-Burch. 2014. Crowd-Workers: Aggregating Information Across Turkers To Help Them Find Higher Paying Work. In HCOMP-2014.
12. Thanakvaro Thyl De Lopez. 2001. Stakeholder management for conservation projects: a case study of Ream National Park, Cambodia. Environmental Management 28, 1 (2001), 47--60.
13. William R Dill. 1975. Public participation in corporate planning Tstrategic management in a Kibitzer's world. Long Range Planning 8, 1 (1975), 57--63.
14. Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca. 2014. Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com. Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 14-054.. (2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2377353 or
15. William M Evan and R Edward Freeman. 1988. A stakeholder theory of the modern corporation: Kantian capitalism.
16. Alek Felstiner. 2011. Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry. Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 32, 1 (2011), 143--203.
17. R Edward Freeman. 1994. The politics of stakeholder theory: Some future directions. Business ethics quarterly (1994), 409--421.
18. R Edward Freeman. 2010. Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Cambridge University press, New York, NY.
19. R Edward Freeman, Jeffrey S Harrison, and Andrew C Wicks. 2007. Managing for stakeholders: Survival, reputation, and success. Yale University Press.
20. R Edward Freeman and David L Reed. 1983. Stockholders and stakeholders: A new perspective on corporate governance. California management review 25, 3 (1983), 88--106.
21. Andrew L Friedman and Samantha Miles. 2006. Stakeholders: Theory and practice. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
22. Milton Friedman. 1970. The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Corporate ethics and corporate governance (1970), 173--178.
23. Mareike Glöss, Moira McGregor, and Barry Brown. 2016. Designing for labour: uber and the on-demand mobile workforce. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1632--1643.
24. Anikó Hannák, Claudia Wagner, David Garcia, Alan Mislove, Markus Strohmaier, and Christo Wilson. 2017. Bias in Online Freelance Marketplaces: Evidence from TaskRabbit and Fiverr. In to appear Proceedings of the 2017 CSCW Conference. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA.
25. Benjamin Hanrahan, Ma Ning, and Yuan Chien Wen. 2017. The Roots of Bias on Uber. In Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work-Exploratory Papers. European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET).
26. Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Jutta K. Willamowski, Saiganesh Swaminathan, and David B. Martin. 2015. TurkBench : Rendering the Market for Turkers. Proceedings of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2015), 0--3.
27. John Hasnas. 1998. The normative theories of business ethics: A guide for the perplexed. Business Ethics Quarterly 8, 1 (1998), 19--42.
28. Jeff Heinfeldt and Fran Wolf. 1998. Re-engineering the business curriculum: A stakeholder paradigm. Journal of Education for Business 73, 4 (1998), 198--201.
29. Panagiotis G Ipeirotis. 2010. Analyzing the amazon mechanical turk marketplace. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students 17, 2 (2010), 16--21.
30. Lilly C Irani and M Silberman. 2013. Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the 2013 CHI Conference. ACM, 611--620.
31. Michael C Jensen. 2001. Value maximization, stakeholder theory, and the corporate objective function. Journal of applied corporate finance 14, 3 (2001), 8--21.
32. Michael C Jensen and William H Meckling. 1976. Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure. Journal of financial economics 3, 4 (1976), 305--360.
33. Joseph Kasera, Jacki O'Neill, and Nicola J. Bidwell. 2016. Sociality, Tempo & Flow: Learning from Namibian Ridesharing. In Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction AfriCHI'16. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 36--47.
34. Aniket Kittur, Jeffrey V Nickerson, Michael Bernstein, Elizabeth Gerber, Aaron Shaw, John Zimmerman, Matt Lease, and John Horton. 2013. The future of crowd work. In Proceedings of the 2013 CSCW Conference. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1301--1318.
35. Tamara Kneese, Alex Rosenblat, and danah boyd. 2014. Understanding Fair Labor Practices in a Networked Age. SSRN Electronic Journal (2014). http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=2536619
36. Min Kyung Lee, Daniel Kusbit, Evan Metsky, and Laura Dabbish. 2015. Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers. In Proceedings of the 2015 CHI Conference. ACM, 1603--1612.
37. Isabelle Maignan, OC Ferrell, and Linda Ferrell. 2005. A stakeholder model for implementing social responsibility in marketing. European Journal of Marketing 39, 9/10 (2005), 956--977.
38. Alexei M Marcoux. 2003. A fiduciary argument against stakeholder theory. Business Ethics Quarterly 13, 1 (2003), 1--24.
39. Richard Marens and Andrew Wicks. 1999. Getting real: Stakeholder theory, managerial practice, and the general irrelevance of fiduciary duties owed to shareholders. Business Ethics Quarterly 9, 2 (1999), 273--293.
40. David Martin, Benjamin V Hanrahan, Jacki O'Neill, and Neha Gupta. 2014. Being a Turker. In Proceedings of the 2014 CSCW Conference. ACM, 224--235.
41. David Martin, Jacki O'Neill, Neha Gupta, and Benjamin V Hanrahan. 2016. Turking in a Global Labour Market. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 25, 1 (2016), 39--77.
42. Ronald K Mitchell, Bradley R Agle, and Donna J Wood. 1997. Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of management review 22, 4 (1997), 853--886.
43. Mette Morsing and Majken Schultz. 2006. Corporate social responsibility communication: stakeholder information, response and involvement strategies. Business Ethics: A European Review 15, 4 (2006), 323--338.
44. Jacki O'Neill and David Martin. 2013. Relationship-based Business Process Crowdsourcing?. In IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Springer, 429--446.
45. Daniel E Palmer. 1999. Upping the stakes: A response to John Hasnas on the normative viability of the stockholder and stakeholder theories. Business Ethics Quarterly 9, 4 (1999), 699--706.
46. Robert Phillips, R Edward Freeman, and Andrew C Wicks. 2003. What stakeholder theory is not. Business Ethics Quarterly 13, 4 (2003), 479--502.
47. Robert A Phillips. 1997. Stakeholder theory and a principle of fairness. Business Ethics Quarterly 7, 1 (1997), 51--66.
48. Noopur Raval and Paul Dourish. 2016. Standing Out from the Crowd: Emotional Labor, Body Labor, and Temporal Labor in Ridesharing. In Proceedings of the 2016 CSCW Conference. ACM, 97--107.
49. Brishen Rogers. 2015. The Social Costs of Uber. The University of Chicago Law Review Dialogue 82, 85 (2015), 85--102.
50. Alex Rosenblat. 2016. Uber's Shift-y Work - Uber Screeds - Medium. (Feb 2016). https://medium.com/ uber-screeds/uber-s-shift-y-work-2665dbb58701
51. Alex Rosenblat, Karen EC Levy, Solon Barocas, and Tim Hwang. 2016. Discriminating Tastes: Customer Ratings as Vehicles for Bias. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2858946. (2016).
52. Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark. 2016. Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber's Drivers. International Journal of Communication 10 (2016), 3758--3784.
53. Niloufar Salehi, Lilly C. Irani, Michael S. Bernstein, Ali Alkhatib, Eva Ogbe, Kristy Milland, and Clickhappier. 2015. We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1621--1630.
54. Maria Sillanpää. 1998. The Body Shop values report--towards integrated stakeholder auditing. Journal of Business Ethics 17, 13 (1998), 1443--1456.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing