Provincializing Algorithmic Management: Platform Labour and Informal Economies in Accra, Ghana

ABSTRACT Algorithmic management is increasingly central to platform‐based labor, yet dominant theories are largely grounded in Global North contexts that assume stable infrastructures, formal employment relations, and effective regulation. This study examines how algorithmic management is experienced and negotiated within an informal and infrastructurally uneven urban context, drawing on qualitative evidence from platform workers in Accra, Ghana. Based on semi‐structured interviews, field observations, and digital ethnography conducted between June and August 2025, the study identifies four interrelated analytical categories: algorithmic dispossession, infrastructural contingency, informal counter‐governance, and conditional freedom. The findings show that algorithmic systems do not operate as neutral tools of coordination; instead, they translate infrastructural failures and spatial inequalities into individualized penalties, intensifying worker precarity. In response, workers rely on peer‐based digital networks and tactical adaptations that mitigate risk without fundamentally altering platform power relations. The study advances theories of algorithmic management and platform labor by demonstrating how informality and infrastructural fragility actively reshape algorithmic governance, rather than merely conditioning it. By foregrounding a Southern urban context, the paper challenges Universalist accounts of digital labor and offers a context‐sensitive framework for analyzing algorithmic management across uneven development landscapes.