Book overview

The Moral Economy of the Machine examines how digitalisation is reshaping work, workers and the social meaning of work in Nigeria. Drawing together historical analysis, structural attention to infrastructure, platforms and policy, and close attention to lived experience, the book asks what happens to identity, belonging, dignity and security when work moves into digitally mediated forms. It argues that digitalisation creates opportunity and loss at the same time, and that the balance between them is shaped by the distribution of power around technology.

About the book

The Meaning of Work Before Digitalisation: Craft, Identity, and Rupture in Nigeria

Traces how work was embedded in occupational cultures, kinship, community and moral order before colonial rule, and follows the ruptures that reshaped work through colonialism and the post-colonial period.

The Infrastructure of Connection: Access, Exclusion, and the Uneven Ground of Digital Work

Examines the mobile revolution, the geography and cost of digital connection, experiences of exclusion, and the role of the state and market in shaping who can participate in the digital economy.

Sectors in Transformation: Finance, Commerce, Transport, and the Remaking of Work

Shows how digitalisation changes finance, government work, commerce, transport and agriculture, revealing a recurring pattern in which new opportunities are accompanied by new forms of dependence and extraction.

The Emerging Nigerian Digital Worker: Formation, Aspiration, and the Making of a Self

Turns to the worker, examining youth entry into digital work, the routes into platform livelihoods, improvised learning and skill formation, and the construction of identity and agency under constraint.

Gig Work, Precarity, and the New Cultures of Work

Examines the arrival and growth of platform work, algorithmic management, worker atomisation, changing workplace boundaries, gender and care, and the ways workers build collective and social responses to precarity.

Skills, Gender, and the Unequal Making of the Digital Worker

Explores digital capability as a new gatekeeper of opportunity, the limits of formal education, improvised apprenticeships, gendered access to digital skill, and the reproduction of inequality through capability.

Digital Justice: Inequality, Resistance, and the Futures of Nigerian Work

Brings the argument together around value, inequality, surveillance, resistance, public infrastructure, worker organisation, regulation and alternative futures, including the emerging implications of artificial intelligence for Nigerian work.