Digital Labour Markets Intermediaries at work in comparative perspective – DIGINTER

While the digitalisation of business activities or financial markets is the subject of a rich literature, the digitalisation of the labor market through the development of digital tools for matching jobseekers to jobs remains understudied. The project proposes to develop a comparative approach to the digitalisation of the labor market in France and Brazil, combining a sociology of the work of digital intermediaries with a sociology of the use of technical devices by jobseekers and recruitment actors. The comparison draws its interest from the confrontation of largely globalized digital devices, linked to the internationalization of the main private players in labor market intermediation, with national contexts structuring radically different labor markets in France and Brazil. Does the digitalisation of the labor market in each country lead to common effects on labor market selectivity, segregation and exclusion of the labor market?
We identify 3 types of for-profit intermediary actors between the supply and demand of labor: paid work platforms, job search engines, and professional social networks. The diversification of the types of intermediaries approached will be crossed with consideration of the segmented nature of sectoral labor markets.We'll be focusing on the home care sector on the one hand, and IT freelancers on the other.
The comparison will focus on several sets of data: 1) massive quantitative and textual data obtained by extracting data from the various sites (webscraping) concerning the catalog of job offers, jobseeker profiles 2) interviews with digital labor market intermediairies professionals to understand how their representation of how the job market works and should work shapes the matching process 3) online ethnography and interviews with digital intermediation devices to understand how the tools are integrated into job search and recruitment practices.