Biography
Since November 2018, Damion Bunders works as a PhD candidate in the Institutions for Collective Action (ICA) research team – first at Utrecht University and now at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. As part of the Sustainable Cooperation program (SCOOP), his dissertation examines how platform cooperatives in the gig economy can become resilient towards the future. Specifically, he is interested in how worker-owned-and-governed platforms address four key challenges of cooperation. How do founders of platform cooperatives manage competing demands during start-up? Under what conditions do workers stay committed as members of a platform cooperative? To what extent does digital mediation influence cooperative members’ participation in decision-making? And how do platform cooperatives employ rules to stimulate labour productivity and prevent freeriding? He studies these questions through semi-structured interviews, survey research, a field experiment, and document analysis.