The 'gig economy' has emerged rapidly as a form of service delivery that challenges existing business models, labour-management practices, and regulations. The ways in which platform companies transact with workers, in particular, has created a burgeoning public interest, but has yet to give rise to a corresponding academic literature. In this paper, we ask whether the gig economy deserves to be a subject of employment relations scholarship, given its current dimensions and likely future. We argue that academic analysis is needed, to better understand the power dynamics operating within the gig economy and how these are testing existing norms and institutions. We discuss two mains ways that employment relations researchers can expand their theoretical repertoires and, in doing so, improve the evidence on gig-based working arrangements. We begin to sketch the outlines of a systematic research agenda, by elaborating indicative questions that need addressing to advance understanding of 'gig work relations'. We caution, however, that academic analysis of the gig economy should not be predicated on an expectation that it is the future of work. A number of economic, industrial and political factors threaten to slow or halt the gig economy's growth.
The concept of mechanism in biology has three distinct meanings. It may refer to a philosophical thesis about the nature of life and biology ('mechanicism'), to the internal workings of a machine-like structure ('machine mechanism'), or to the causal explanation of a particular phenomenon ('causal mechanism'). In this paper I trace the conceptual evolution of 'mechanism' in the history of biology, and I examine how the three meanings of this term have come to be featured in the philosophy of biology, situating the new 'mechanismic program' in this context. I argue that the leading advocates of the mechanismic program (i.e., Craver, Darden, Bechtel, etc.) inadvertently conflate the different senses of 'mechanism'. Specifically, they all inappropriately endow causal mechanisms with the ontic status of machine mechanisms, and this invariably results in problematic accounts of the role played by mechanism-talk in scientific practice. I suggest that for effective analyses of the concept of mechanism, causal mechanisms need to be distinguished from machine mechanisms, and the new mechanismic program in the philosophy of biology needs to be demarcated from the traditional concerns of mechanistic biology.
The machine conception of the organism (MCO) is one of the most pervasive notions in modern biology. However, it has not yet received much attention by philosophers of biology. The MCO has its origins in Cartesian natural philosophy, and it is based on the metaphorical redescription of the organism as a machine. In this paper I argue that although organisms and machines resemble each other in some basic respects, they are actually very different kinds of systems. I submit that the most significant difference between organisms and machines is that the former are intrinsically purposive whereas the latter are extrinsically purposive. Using this distinction as a starting point, I discuss a wide range of dissimilarities between organisms and machines that collectively lay bare the inadequacy of the MCO as a general theory of living systems. To account for the MCO's prevalence in biology, I distinguish between its theoretical, heuristic, and rhetorical functions. I explain why the MCO is valuable when it is employed heuristically but not theoretically, and finally I illustrate the serious problems that arise from the rhetorical appeal to the MCO.
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