O uso corporativo do território brasileiro pelas plataformas digitais de intermediação do trabalho docente

Abstract

The centrality of digital platforms in contemporary society and space constitutes the basis for a new productive frontier in the lucrative educational market. In this research, we address one of these aspects, focusing on a set of platform companies that develop educational "solutions" and “digital innovations”, offering on-demand freelance teachers in Brazil, which we refer to as digital platforms for teaching work intermediation. Controlled by national (Tutor Mundi, Profes and other) and foreign business groups (such as the French Superprof, the American Preply, among others companies based in the core capitalist countries), these platform companies are dependent on the technical-scientific-informational environment, that is, on the unequal presence of modernizations in the territory. These agents supersede local economic activities such as tutoring schools managed by small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as the market for traditional private lessons offered informally in urban neighborhoods and suburbs. Through this platformized intermediation and management, aimed at establishing a drainage of resources from multiple locations of operation to their distant command centers, these agents carry out corporate uses of the Brazilian territory through a series of strategies. In this context, our aim with this work is to understand how dominant platform companies in the sector operate in the Brazilian territory. To do so, we analyze the sociotechnical characteristics of digital platforms for teaching work (especially the functioning of the algorithm, reputation model, monetization, georeferencing and search engine), the advertising that drives the service, and also the size and topology of these companies (headquarters, office distribution, investors). This process leads to a new front of pauperization of teaching work, as these business agents raise the spacial scale of competition, create in the digital environment a work logic without labor security, with low remuneration and flawed pedagogical fundamentals.