Many workers have been drawn to the gig economy by the promise of flexible, autonomous work, but scholars have highlighted how independent working arrangements also come with the drawbacks of ...precarity. Digital platforms appear to provide an alternative to certain aspects of precarity by helping workers find work consistently and securely. However, these platforms also introduce their own demands and constraints. Drawing on 20 interviews with online freelancers, 19 interviews with corresponding clients and a first-hand walkthrough of the Upwork platform, we identify critical literacies (what we call gig literacies), which are emerging around online freelancing. We find that gig workers must adapt their skills and work strategies in order to leverage platforms creatively and productively, and as a component of their ‘personal holding environment’. This involves not only using the resources provided by the platform effectively, but also negotiating or working around its imposed structures and control mechanisms.
On online labour platforms, algorithmic scores are used as indicators of freelancers' work quality and future performance. Recent studies underscore that, to achieve good scores and secure their ...presence on platforms, freelancers respond to algorithmic control in different ways. However, we argue, to fully understand how freelancers deal with algorithmic scores, we first need to investigate how they interpret scores and, more specifically, what scores can do for them, i.e., perceived algorithmic affordances and constraints. Our interviews and other qualitative data collected with knowledge intensive gig workers on a major platform allow us to explain how the perceived affordances of algorithms (i.e., barrier, individual visibility, self‐extension, rule of the game) act as mechanisms that explain different behavioural and emotional responses over time. Our work contributes to the current debate on the positive and negative consequences of algorithmic work by portraying the fundamental role paid by the individual interpretation of algorithmic scores and by integrating the affordance perspective into our understanding of algorithmic work.
Numerous digital labour platforms have emerged across various Latin American countries, connecting users with domestic services and care for children, the elderly, and dependents. Despite this ...growth, regulatory debates have largely ignored the digitalization of this sector, and there is a lack of research documenting the impact of these new technologies in the region. The purpose of this article is to enhance the existing body of knowledge on the platform economy in Latin America and the Caribbean with two main objectives: firstly, to provide an initial mapping of the platforms operating in the domestic and home care services; and secondly, to analyze the potential role these digital platforms can play in formalizing the labor market for workers in these sectors
Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational ...work as a means of attenuating labour commodification, precarity, and algorithmic normativity. The article argues that creative work on online labour platforms, rather than being entirely controlled by depersonalised, anonymised and algorithm-driven labour market forces, is also infused in relational infrastructures whose upkeep, solidity and durability depends on the emotional efforts undertaken by workers to match economic transactions and their media of exchange to meaningful client relations. By applying a relational work perspective from economic sociology to the study of platform-mediated gig work, the article elucidates the micro-foundations of creative work in the digital gig economy, including how labour inequalities are produced and reproduced within and around micro-level interpersonal interactions.
Platform labour scholars have noted the prevalence of migrant workers in the gig economy. This paper builds on this research but interrogates the broad concept of ‘migrant labour’. The study draws on ...biographical interviews with platform workers in grocery delivery and domestic work platforms in Berlin, Germany as well as expert interviews with union representatives, migrant organisations and white-collar platform company employees. Through an examination of the mobility strategies of platform workers in this subset of the platform economy, the study reveals a stratification of migrant trajectories and of skills needed to engage in platform work across different types of labour platforms. The study finds that platform companies draw on a workforce that consists of recently arrived young migrants with comparatively high education, language skills and digital literacy. Through close analysis of an understudied section of the gig economy, the paper contributes to the ongoing theorisation of the nexus of migration regimes and platform-mediated labour regimes. The findings complicate the notion of ‘accessibility’ of platform work and call for the inclusion of visa regimes, immigration categories and particular skill sets in future research on platform labour.
Information and communication technologies have long been predicted to spread economic opportunities to rural areas. However, the actual trend in the 21st century has been the opposite. Knowledge ...spillovers have fuelled urbanisation and pulled job-seekers into large cities, increasing the gap with rural areas. We argue that new assemblages of technologies and social practices, so-called 'online labour platforms', have recently started to counter this trend. By providing effective formal and informal mechanisms of enforcing cooperation, these platforms for project-based remote knowledge work enable users to hire and find work across distance. In analysing data from a leading online labour platform in more than 3000 urban and rural counties in the United States, we find that rural workers made disproportionate use of the online labour market. Rural counties also supplied, on average, higher-skilled online work than urban areas did. However, many of the most remote regions of the country did not participate in the online labour market at all. Our findings highlight the potentials and limitations of such platforms for regional economic development.
CODE AND DATA: www.github.com/Braesemann/Rural
This paper applies insights from global value chains (GVC)/global production networks (GPN) frameworks to explore the economic geographies brought into being by digital labour platforms. In ...particular, these perspectives facilitate analyses of power imbalances and value extraction across territories—an under‐theorized aspect within platform studies. We theorize this dynamic by introducing the descriptor ‘digital value network’ (DVN): a digitally mediated nexus of platform operations that produce and distribute value between territories, on the basis of labour transactions. Empirically, we draw on a multi‐year action research project, assessing the operations of platforms and the experiences of platform workers in 54 countries. Our analysis highlights that platforms as lead firms extend GVC/GPN logics of coordination and drivenness in DVN to (i) optimize production capabilities while externalizing ownership and costs, (ii) accumulate both monetary and non‐monetary forms of value, and (iii) concentrate power at the global scale in both existing and new sectors.
The article analyses the effects of digital labour platforms in a context characterised by high informality, exploring the way platforms may or may not imply a disruption in this respect. To do so, ...it examines the labour transitions that lead to platform labour, taking into account the formal status of workers before and after joining platforms, as well as their evaluation of resulting labour conditions. The article relies on a quantitative survey and in depth interviews for three on‐demand occupations in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, ride‐hailing, home repairs and domestic service. Results show that a platform's influence on the formal status of workers (and their assessment of it) is highly contingent upon: the platform's business model, including the legal status that may be used to integrate the workforce, the pre‐existing formal/informal dynamics within the occupation and the general labour market situation.
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