Algorithmic Management Across Platform and Traditional Work: Evidence from Hungary—Testing the Five Principles of Stark and Vanden Broeck

Algorithmic management (AM) has become a key lens for analyzing the digital transformation of work, yet empirical research remains centered on platform labor in North America, Western Europe, and China. This paper applies the five-principles framework covering organizational form, object of management, ideology, modality, and accountability in an exploratory comparison of contrasting organizational settings within one country, Hungary. We define AM as the exercise of managerial functions such as direction, allocation, evaluation, discipline, and remuneration through software systems that continuously capture worker data, process them automatically, and feed the resulting decisions back into the labor process. The analysis draws on a base of 43 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2019 and 2024, all of which, drawn from the five interview-based cases (Wolt, Bolt, Upwork, Data Analytics and ConLog), constitute the coded analytical corpus, together with 21 h of participant observation and documentary evidence, contrasting four platform cases (Wolt, Bolt, Uber, and the freelance marketplace Upwork) with two traditional organizations, a Data Analytics company and a multinational logistics subsidiary. Evidence on Uber is confined to documentary sources (regulatory, parliamentary, legal and media records); the case is therefore used as an institutional and regulatory comparator only, and no worker-level generalizations are drawn from it. Findings suggest that AM is neither homogeneous nor confined to platforms. Full co-optation, including twisted accountability and dissolved organizational boundaries, appears mainly in platform work, whereas AM in traditional firms operates within hierarchies and formal employment, producing constrained co-optation, bounded ideology, and partially re-anchored accountability. We propose the partial Möbius effect as a testable hypothesis rather than as an established theoretical result: it was derived inductively from two traditional cases only (Data Analytics and ConLog) and has not yet been tested against a third, independent case. Its scope, boundary conditions, and durability are left as questions for future comparative and longitudinal research.