The ‘Digital Moral Economy’ of Care:Institutional Logics and the Legitimation of AI-Based Algorithmic Management

Research on platform work has largely focused on algorithmic management in sectors such as delivery and ride-hailing, paying limited attention to care and domestic services and their moral dimensions. This article theorizes how platforms integrate technology-mediated economic activities with moral principles of care. Drawing on ethnographic data from 64 narrative interviews in Belgium and France, we show how platforms legitimate AI-based and technologically embedded forms of management by aligning them with institutional care logics. We conceptualize this as a ‘digital moral economy’ of care, structured around three key dimensions: efficiency, civic contribution, and transactional relationships. Through these, platforms frame algorithmic coordination as socially valuable, morally acceptable, and practically enabling forms of care exchange. While these justificatory logics converge across national contexts, they are articulated through distinct institutional arrangements. Findings advance debates on algorithmic management by demonstrating how moral narratives are central to the legitimation of platform-mediated care services.