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Platform cooperatives that are owned and governed by gig workers themselves have been proposed as a silver bullet to improve these workers' influence on organizational decision-making. However, they remain relatively rare compared with dominant investor-owned platforms. Traditionally, worker cooperatives strive for alternative organizing based on the ideal of workplace democracy but are often faced with unequal participation by members in decision-making processes. To test for participation inequalities, this study used survey data (n  =   418) from a network of four platform worker cooperatives in Italy. The results show that members with lower affective commitment towards their cooperative and less social capital among other members are less likely to participate, but that there is no effect of cooperative size and human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently proliferating 'smart city' building efforts have lent themselves well to interpretations through the lens of the policy mobilities literature. Applying this perspective, studies have insightfully shown how policymaking centred around smart cities is at once a messy, networked process stretching across scales, while also manifesting itself in concrete practices shaped by territorial–regulatory contexts. Informed by empirical research on smart city policies in Hungary and the Netherlands, this paper argues that the policy mobilities approach tends to overemphasize the global and the local. Notwithstanding the transnational circulation of smart city ideas, the national scale continues being reproduced by these ideas as a relevant scale of urban regulation, discursive framing and strategy-making under globalization. To acknowledge this, and to move towards a more decidedly multiscalar perspective on actually existing smart urbanisms, it is suggested that we incorporate the national scale, understood as a relational set of practices and discourses, more explicitly into our analysis. Insights from the Hungarian and Dutch case studies are used to illustrate the manifold ways in which the local embedding of the globally mobile smart city concept is shaped by the national scale, as well as how the national itself is being renegotiated in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]