This article investigates precarious workers’ organising by considering the case of freelancers, a category between the self-employed – usually represented by employer organisations – and employees – ...whose interests are traditionally defended by trade unions. Drawing on a 6-month ethnography conducted in the Netherlands within two freelancer associations, our study shows their capacity to exercise collective forms of ‘critical agency’ – on the one hand, by questioning their established practices and seeking to innovate their repertoire, and on the other, by staging protest actions, despite the long Dutch tradition of consensus-based social dialogue. The aim of the article is twofold. First, it contributes to the debate on precarious workers’ organising by considering freelancers as agentic subjects, whose collective identity and organising practices shape and are shaped not only by the socio-institutional context, but also by the type of relationships they create and in which they are embedded. Second, by focusing on collective everyday practices as fields of production of the new, it illustrates diverse forms of critical agency exercised by freelancers, thus offering an empirical contribution to the understanding of critical agency in its making.
The most dynamic economies in the world are characterised by an entrepreneurial, innovation-driven business sector. And this requires firms to unburden themselves from bureaucratic constraints and ...become more agile and flexible. A key, and hitherto ignored, agent in this transformative process is the freelancer. Historically considered as displaced and disenfranchised workers, we argue that many freelancers are in fact highly skilled professionals who choose this form of work organisation. Further, their role in providing specialist expertise and knowledge to the firms they engage with is critical and mutually beneficial as it allows firms to adopt more flexible and agile business models capable of responding to a dynamic and rapidly changing business environment.
This article examines how journalists in non-permanent employment respond to their growing precarity. It is based on in-depth interviews with freelance journalists and interns who find that their ...working lives increasingly require entrepreneurial efforts. To work towards continuous access to journalistic work, these casually employed journalists engage in self-management and self-branding. To be able to make a living, they subsidize their income with work for clients outside of journalism that frequently offer better working conditions than news organizations but pursue narrow, strategic goals. The article develops a typology of non-journalistic work that illustrates that some non-journalistic jobs, but not others, cause these precarious news workers to defend their journalistic professional integrity. Furthermore, the study introduces Michel Foucault’s notions of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ and the ‘ethical self’ to interpret the different registers of professionalism between which journalists move today, identified as counter-, conforming and coping subjectivity. Thereby, the article uses a novel conceptual lens to make sense of resilience and change in journalistic professional identities under conditions of precarity.
As the pool of potential employees for businesses throughout the world grows, the world is transforming into a global village. Pakistan is currently the 4th fastest-growing freelancing market in the ...world having growth rate 47%. The web development sector is essential to the economies of developing countries like Pakistan. In this study, the web development in Pakistan is surveyed to get statistical conclusions about the demand for particular job roles and skills set, required in the context of Pakistani web industry. This is accomplished by extracting and examining job listings from the most well-known job portals in Pakistan such as rozee.pk, mustakbil.com, and indeed. The study findings provide the present demand in the Pakistani web sector for web developers. For instance, expertise in Git, Firebug, Adobe photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Figma, WordPress, Shopify, Magento, OOP, MVC, AJAX, SEO, MySql, MongoDB, are at highest rank. The conducted study will be beneficial for student counselling groups, job seekers, researchers, industry professionals, academic curriculum developers, government planners, and decision-makers.
Coworking spaces (CSs) have gained significant attention in the last decades as an alternative to traditional offices and homes. These spaces offer a flexible and collaborative environment that ...caters to the needs of freelancers, entrepreneurs, and remote workers. The purpose of this paper is to systematically review academic literature to investigate how CSs contribute to workers' quality of working life (QWL) and wellbeing. Literature is analysed thematically following the QWL framework proposed by Walton (1973). The findings of this review suggest that CSs may act as a quasi-organisation by emulating the role traditionally undertaken by employers contributing to different aspects of workers’ QWL, which ultimately affect their wellbeing. CSs’ contribution largely depends on the different material features of the spaces, the services offered, the work culture promoted, the curation activity of the host, the coworking members, and the complex interrelation among all these elements. In the conclusive section, the review identifies potential research gaps and areas for future research in this field.
The audiovisual translation (AVT) sector has undergone rapid changes in recent years. It would be uncontroversial to state that the various stakeholders: academics; freelancers; technology providers, ...and language service providers (LSP) are likely to hold diverse and interesting views about what the future holds and how they might be called upon to adapt to recent and future changes. We have conducted qualitative research with representatives of these stakeholders in an attempt to ascertain their concerns and also their predictions for the future. Our motivation was to discover where stakeholders see the sector in the next 10 years. The research was conducted in 2016 and 2018 during the Languages and Media conference on a sample of 160 experts from various sector stakeholder groups. The findings show a broad range of issues that can be summarised into three main themes: the status of the language service provider; the need for standards and metrics; and the importance of training.
Lay summary
Audiovisual translation, or media translation such as subtitling and dubbing, has changed a great deal in recent years. Professionals involved in the creation of translations for television and film, which includes the ever-more popular platforms such as Netflix, are likely to have differing views on what the future holds for their industry, especially given the rising volume of translations made by machine translation systems which are then edited by human translators. We have conducted research among professionals involved in the audiovisual translation production process at a conference that takes place in Berlin every two years: Languages and the Media. This was an ideal place for such work since it attracts subtitlers, translators for dubbing, people who work in TV content translation, and trainers of media translators. We were hoping to discover the views of a wide range of people about what might happen in the short to medium term in the industry. The research was conducted in 2016 and 2018 among 160 professionals, such as subtitlers and employees of streaming platforms. The findings reveal some issues connected to translating for the media and point to the need for measuring translation quality and investing more resources into media translation training.
The various rhetorics of 'agile', 'agility', and 'agile working' (AW) set an agenda for new ways of working and have recently gained traction in popular management discourse, particularly in the wake ...of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet conceptually, these rhetorical varieties of 'agile' are underdeveloped in the academic literature. In this article we examine the stream of AW as being a particularly influential rhetoric. AW is critically evaluated by first identifying separate streams and rhetorics of 'agile' in the literature, and AW is then situated within this typology. To understand the particular version of reality being mainstreamed by the AW rhetoric, we then examine AWs conceptualisation as 'a new way of working', as promoted by dominant actors within the UK work context. We then consider existing studies of worker experiences under different employment arrangements that can be subsumed under the heading of 'AW practices'. Our analysis highlights voids between what may be considered as mainstream HR practice when applied to standard employees compared to a spectrum of 'non-standard' workers. The implications for the role of HR in the implementation of AW and in managing the worker experience are discussed and future avenues for this under-researched area are offered.
Information technology made significant changes in our everyday life and there is no exception in employment relations as well. Within, it brought new actor in demand and supply for labour which is ...represent in digital labour platforms. Although first impression is that they are intermediate between labour and need for it, actually they have some functions which are characteristic for employers. But, at the end, main (negative) consequence is up to digital worker. In this paper, our main aim is to highlight work through digital platforms and its impact on legal position of digital workers.
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