Emiliana Armano
This volume addresses the critical evolution of participatory research methodologies, with particular emphasis on the Italian tradition of worker inquiry and co-research practices. Building upon and expanding the Italian collection Pratiche di inchiesta e conricerca oggi (eds. Emiliana Armano, Ombre corte, 2020)—freely available through the University of Milan’s repository—this work not only offers an English translation but significantly broadens the thematic scope and analytical perspectives of the original contribution.
Through collaborative scholarship by diverse authors, this collection explores how inquiry and co-research practices maintain their analytical power and transformative potential in contemporary contexts. The work positions itself within broader debates surrounding critical theories and participatory methodologies in the social sciences, establishing meaningful connections with the traditions of Italian operaismo and critical sociology. Drawing inspiration from critical Marxism, sociology of social movements, and cultural studies, this approach emphasizes knowledge production “from below”—a bottom-up epistemological framework that fundamentally challenges conventional academic hierarchies.
The theoretical framework presented here engages actively with current international debates on “militant research” and “participatory action-research,” methodologies that have evolved within both academic and social contexts worldwide. In this regard, the text contributes significantly to discussions on transforming social research models to address the multifaceted challenges posed by contemporary capitalism, digital transformation, and emerging forms of labor organization.
This volume seeks to illuminate the theoretical-interpretive approach of co-research as a critical participatory model, positioning it to realize its heuristic and exploratory potential for critical social research. The co-research approach emerges not merely as a research tool but as a transformative practice that bridges the gap between academic inquiry and social activism, offering new pathways for understanding and challenging contemporary forms of exploitation and control.
The volume is organized into two complementary parts, each serving distinct yet interconnected purposes in mapping the contemporary landscape of inquiry and co-research practices.
The first part, “Interpretations of the Present,” provides comprehensive analysis of how co-research methodologies can illuminate and critique contemporary socio-economic transformations. This section demonstrates the continued relevance and adaptability of inquiry practices in understanding new forms of capitalism and their impact on work, education, and social relations. Here is a brief overview of the first part.
The chapter Co-Research in a Time of Platform Capitalism by Emiliana Armano offers foundational analysis that situates co-research within the context of digital platform capitalism. This contribution explores how traditional frameworks of workers’ inquiry must evolve to comprehend the new configurations of labor, control, and resistance that characterize platform-based economic models. Armano’s work provides essential theoretical groundwork for understanding how digital technologies reshape both the conditions of work and the methodologies needed to study them critically.
Enhancement or Impoverishment? Algorithmic Management and ‘Distance’ Education During the Pandemic: Theoretical and Interpretive Hypotheses by Emiliana Armano, Andrea Cavazzini, and Rosanna Maccarone examines the profound transformations in educational practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. This collaborative analysis investigates how algorithmic management systems penetrated educational institutions, fundamentally altering teaching and learning processes. The authors employ co-research methodologies to examine whether these technological interventions represent genuine enhancement of educational capabilities or constitute forms of impoverishment that reduce the complexity of pedagogical relationships to algorithmic logic.
Algorithmic Management in Food Delivery Platforms: Between Digital Neo-Taylorism and Enhanced Subjectivity by Emiliana Armano, Daniela Leonardi, and Annalisa Murgia provides detailed examination of one of the most visible manifestations of platform capitalism: food delivery services. This study employs co-research approaches to investigate how algorithmic management systems operate as new forms of digital Taylorism, creating unprecedented levels of control over workers while simultaneously promising flexibility and autonomy. The analysis reveals the contradictory nature of platform work, where enhanced subjectivity and intensified control coexist in complex and often paradoxical ways.
The chapter Autonomy, Free Labor, and Passions as Devices of Creative Capitalism: Narratives from a Co-Research in Journalism and the Editing Industry by Cristina Morini, Kristin Carls, and Emiliana Armano explores the transformation of creative industries under contemporary capitalism. Through co-research conducted within journalism and publishing sectors, the authors examine how concepts of autonomy, passion, and creative fulfillment become mechanisms for extracting unpaid or underpaid labor. This contribution reveals how the rhetoric of creative freedom often masks new forms of exploitation, particularly affecting precarious workers in knowledge-intensive industries.
Insights and Trajectories of Analysis is the title of the second part. This section serves as both historical grounding and methodological foundation, providing essential context for understanding the evolution and theoretical basis of co-research practices. This part pays particular attention to the intellectual legacy of Romano Alquati, one of the founding figures of the Italian co-research tradition.
The chapter Co-Research and Workers’ Inquiry by Romano Alquati presents fundamental theoretical and methodological insights from one of the pioneers of this approach. Alquati’s contribution provides historical depth and methodological rigor, demonstrating how worker inquiry emerged as both an investigative tool and a form of political practice. Alquati’s work distinguishes co-research from traditional workers’ inquiry by emphasizing its transformative and participatory nature. While workers’ inquiry often functions as a short-term, knowledge-gathering tool conducted by external actors (unions or parties), co-research represents an ongoing, embedded practice that blurs the lines between research and political action.
Alquati highlights two key divergences between these approaches. Epistemological: Co-research rejects universalistic uniform models of social research in favor of partial, situated knowledge rooted in the perspectives of oppressed groups, mapping power structures “from below”; Functional: Unlike inquiry, which feeds knowledge into pre-existing organizations, co-research builds organizational forms directly from class experiences and struggles, integrating theory and praxis to foster collective emancipation.
Alquati critiques capitalism’s “hyper-industrial” logic and class composition, where cognitive and affective labor are commodified, and argues for co-research as a method to reclaim these capacities. He advocates for relations between researchers and hyper-proletarians, leveraging their differing capacities synergistically to produce “counter-science” that challenges dominant power structures. His work illustrates the inseparable connection between knowledge production and political action that characterizes authentic co-research practices.
The chapter Co-Research and Counter-Research: Romano Alquati’s Itinerary Within and Beyond Italian Radical Political Thought by Devi Sacchetto, Emiliana Armano, and Steve Wright offers comprehensive analysis of Alquati’s intellectual trajectory and his lasting influence on critical research approaches. This contribution traces the development of Alquati’s thinking from its origins in 1960s factory struggles to its contemporary relevance for understanding new forms of labor and control. The authors demonstrate how Alquati’s insights continue to provide valuable tools for analyzing contemporary capitalism, particularly its mutations toward platform and algorithmic management. Alquati’s call for “counter-cooperation” between researchers and workers resonates with the book’s broader aim: to confront new forms of exploitation. His critique of capitalistic hyper-industrialization anticipates current debates on digital Taylorism and the gig economy.
Why Read Alquati Today?, by Steve Wright, concludes the volume by addressing the contemporary relevance of Alquati’s work. Wright’s contribution serves as both an introduction for new readers and a reflection on the enduring significance of the co-research approach. This chapter bridges historical understanding with contemporary application, demonstrating why Alquati’s insights remain crucial for current social research and political practice.
This collection demonstrates that inquiry and co-research practices are not merely historical artifacts but vital contemporary tools for understanding and challenging current forms of capitalism. The transformation of work under digital platforms, the penetration of algorithmic management into various sectors, and the emergence of new forms of precarity all require analytical frameworks capable of grasping both technological innovation and social transformation.
The approach presented throughout this volume emphasizes the importance of research that emerges from and remains connected to the struggles and experiences of workers and social movements. This commitment to knowledge production from below offers alternatives to purely academic research models, creating possibilities for research that serves emancipatory purposes rather than simply advancing scholarly careers or institutional interests.
While the specific results of the various inquiries are naturally affected by time and historicization—given their roots in particular periods—it is the theoretical research approach itself that this book seeks to highlight. The notion of class composition is placed at the center of the various analyses, particularly the question of hyper-industrialisation inherent in the functioning of the digital machine. From this point of view, interest focuses on the analysis of the technical composition of capital, as a reconstruction of the organizational processes that, within this framework composed of the active combination of human capacity and capital means, realize the extraction of value from those social practices that capitalist socialization, mediated by digital platforms, makes possible today.
Alongside the definition of a hybrid and controversial profile of exploitation, which we might define as performance activity, an organizational model is spreading that underlies a whole series of postures implicated by the active combination of algorithms with human activity. In the current capitalist phase, this tendency directs not only the Marxian workforce but the entire active human capacity toward performance, aiming to perform subjectivity across all fields of social action.
In such a context, how can co-research still be considered relevant? Taking up Romano Alquati’s approach, this volume offers a critical examination of co-research as a practice for producing critically oriented knowledge and a potential tool for social transformation. Not reducible to a social research methodology, it aims to transform both the ‘object’ of research and the ‘researcher’ —not in the abstract, but in relation to different phases of capitalist development with the class composition given at any particular time, with its technical and political dimensions in constant tension toward that gap that sometimes allows the formation of subjectivities not subject to capitalism’s apparent determinism.
Focusing on the question of neoliberal subject production and widespread precariousness in the “industrialisation of action”, this volume aims to open debate based on inquiries and studies that focus on significant areas—from work mediated by digital platforms to the condition of freelancers in publishing, to the precarious situation of university education and research—contexts in which another subjectivity is emerging and struggling to make its way.
As capitalism continues to evolve through a crisis of globalisation, digital transformation, environmental crisis, and new forms of social control, the need for critical participatory research methodologies becomes increasingly urgent. The contributions in this volume demonstrate how co-research can provide both analytical tools and practical approaches for understanding and challenging these developments. The work presented here suggests that the future of critical social research lies not in detached observation but in engaged inquiry that contributes to collective understanding and transformative action.
