Locating online labour: the salience of the national scale in remote digital work

Digital work that takes place exclusively online is often presented as spatially unbound, with workers able to work flexibly whenever and wherever they wish to do so, resulting – it is claimed – in the emergence of a ‘planetary labour market’ for online labour. Recent analyses have shown that fully remote work still clusters in geographical concentrations and is unevenly distributed across the globe. Drawing on an original data set of in-depth interviews with 67 adult webcam performers, we argue that spatially embedded, nationally scaled institutions, cultural norms and infrastructures such as regulatory, welfare and linguistic regimes have enduring salience in shaping the labour markets and labour processes of remote digital workers. We illustrate these through case studies with workers in three European countries (The United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Romania). We propose a novel theorisation of digital work and digital labour markets which understands them – even when purely online – as embedded and constituted by specific and pre-existing spatial, institutional and cultural arrangements largely at scale of the nation-state. The wider significance is that in identifying contextually specific labour processes, we argue that labour is often sold as part of discrete supply chains and bounded markets. We retheorise such labour as immanently constituted by nation-scale cultural and infrastructural norms and practices such as regulation and gender-regimes and show how these remain salient to online-only digital work.