This article evaluates the job quality of work in the remote gig economy. Such work consists of the remote provision of a wide variety of digital services mediated by online labour platforms. Focusing on workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the article draws on semi-structured interviews in six countries ( N = 107) and a cross-regional survey ( N = 679) to detail the manner in which remote gig work is shaped by platform-based algorithmic control. Despite varying country contexts and types of work, we show that algorithmic control is central to the operation of online labour platforms. Algorithmic management techniques tend to offer workers high levels of flexibility, autonomy, task variety and complexity. However, these mechanisms of control can also result in low pay, social isolation, working unsocial and irregular hours, overwork, sleep deprivation and exhaustion.

This article presents findings regarding collective organisation among online freelancers in middle‐income countries. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa, we find that the specific nature of the online freelancing labour process gives rise to a distinctive form of organisation, in which social media groups play a central role in structuring communication and unions are absent. Previous research is limited to either conventional freelancers or ‘microworkers’ who do relatively low‐skilled tasks via online labour platforms. This study uses 107 interviews and a survey of 658 freelancers who obtain work via a variety of online platforms to highlight that Internet‐based communities play a vital role in their work experiences. Internet‐based communities enable workers to support each other and share information. This, in turn, increases their security and protection. However, these communities are fragmented by nationality, occupation and platform.

This article investigates the (dis)embeddedness of digital labour within the remote gig economy. We use interview and survey data to highlight how platform workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are normatively disembedded from social protections through a process of commodification. Normative disembeddedness leaves workers exposed to the vagaries of the external labour market due to an absence of labour regulations and rights. It also endangers social reproduction by limiting access to healthcare and requiring workers to engage in significant unpaid 'work-for-labour'. However, we show that these workers are also simultaneously embedded within interpersonal networks of trust, which enable the work to be completed despite the low-trust nature of the gig economy. In bringing together the concepts of normative and network embeddedness, we reconnect the two sides of Polanyi's thinking and demonstrate the value of an integrated understanding of Polanyi's approach to embeddedness for understanding contemporary economic transformations.

This article investigates the use of Internet networks during the recent mobilisation of Californian Walmart workers. The findings of this case study suggest that Internetbased mass self-communication networks (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) can complement traditional organising techniques. Mass self-communication networks ameliorate many of the weaknesses identified by previous studies of Internet networks. In particular, these types of networks can help overcome negative dispositions towards unions, increase the density of communication and the level of participation among members, create a collective identity congruent with trade unionism, facilitate organisation and spread 'swarming actions' which are effective at leveraging symbolic power. Moreover, unions may be well suited to providing crucial strategic oversight and coordination to wider worker networks.

This article examines the operation of flexible scheduling in practice through a case study of a large retail firm in the United Kingdom. It includes analysis of 39 semistructured interviews, participant observation of shop floor work and non-participant observation of union organizing as well as analysis of key documents. The findings highlight the high level of generalized temporal flexibility across employment statuses. This temporal flexibility enables firm flexibility without necessitating a reliance upon contingent workers. Temporal flexibility is found to entail manager-control of flexible scheduling and is shown to be damaging to perceptions of job quality as it acts as a barrier to work-life balance. Union presence and collective bargaining at the firm are found to be ineffective at influencing flexible scheduling so as to improve job quality. This ineffectiveness can be explained by the union operating in an employer-dominated industrial relations environment in which its associational power is unable to compensate for a lack of institutional and structural economic power.

This article uses two ethnographic retail case studies to investigate contemporary workplace control. The findings highlight how flexible scheduling has serious consequences for workers and causes insecurity. This provides managers with a powerful and unaccountable mechanism for securing control. The benefits for managers of using flexible scheduling to secure control are shown to be its ambiguity and flexibility. Moreover, flexible scheduling creates an environment where workers must continually strive to maintain managers’ favour. Little evidence is found to suggest that this control is aided by work games obscuring workplace relations. Flexible scheduling does, however, enable misrecognition of workplace relations due to the schedule gifts which it entails. Schedule gifts act to bind workers to managers’ interests through feelings of gratitude and moral obligation.

David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.

Protest in the gig economy has taken many forms and targets (platforms, customers, and state officials). However, researchers are yet to adequately account for this diversity. We use a European survey of Upwork and PeoplePerHour platform workers in the remote gig economy to investigate worker orientation towards different forms of protest. Results reveal that worker anger, dependence, and digital communication shape contention in the remote gig 2 economy. Support for collective organisation is associated not only with anger at platforms but also workers' dependence on the platform and communication with other workers. Whereas individual action against clients is associated only with anger and communicationbut not communication and support for state regulation is associated only with anger but not dependence or communication. We conclude that despite the novelty of these emergent social relations, the relational approach entailed by Mobilisation Theory can aid explanation of contention in the gig economy by shedding light on the dynamic process by which solidarity and dependence alter the perceived costs and benefits of particular remedies to injustice.