Advocates of the boundaryless career perspective have relied to a great extent on the assumption that actors take responsibility for their own career development and that they consequently take charge of developing their career competencies. In this provocation piece, we debate the obstructions to and potential ways to promote boundaryless careers in the gig economy, which—despite appearing on the surface to offer suitable conditions for boundaryless careers—suffers from numerous conditions that hinder such careers. Thus, boundaryless careers in the gig economy could be an oxymoron. In particular, we conjecture that intraorganisational and interorganisational career boundaries restrict gig workers' development of relevant career competencies and thus limit their mobility. We then put forward the notion that we have to consider moving away from traditional, employer‐centric human resource management and introduce new forms of network‐based and self‐organised human resource management practices (in the form of collaborative communities of practice) in order to diminish these boundaries.

The present study investigates how individual and collaborative job crafting may help digital labourers to build resilience and career commitment in the gig economy. Results based on a time‐lagged survey from 334 digital labourers indicate that those who engaged in higher individual job crafting reported subsequently higher resilience at the outset. Moreover, high collaborative job crafting compensated for low individual crafting efforts in reaching higher resilience and subsequently higher career commitment in the gig economy. Theoretical and practical implications for sustainable careers in the gig economy are discussed.

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Digital Labor, taking up flexible but small‐scale employment arrangements on online intermediary platforms, with few constraints on how much, when, and where work is performed, are becoming the new work reality for many individuals. Scholars have argued that this type of work is inherently demeaning. We seek to explore the worker’s perspective and how their long‐term perspective aligns or misaligns with their actual work arrangement. We draw on career construction theory and hypothesize a job–career congruence model suggesting that when workers’ cognitive presentations of their microwork as jobs or careers are incongruent, they are less likely to experience their work as meaningful. The results from a two‐stage field study of 803 workers from two microworking platforms support the negative effect of an incongruent job–career schema on workers’ experience of meaningful work. Additionally, results demonstrate that even workers who are proactive in nature, seem unable to excel in these fluid work settings when their job‐career schema are not aligned. Practitioner Points Contrary to what platform organizations may expect, digital labourers view crowdworking as both a job and a career, which in turn fosters meaningfulness. Careers are important aspect in understanding digital labourers’ understanding of their jobs and careers. Keeping this in mind, we would encourage platform organizations to: provide career development opportunities, instead of focusing on short‐term incentives. This would cultivate crowdworkers’ career outlook, cultivate job–career congruence, and help mediate issues related to lack of career prosperity in microwork design. recognize aspirational career elements, such as career ladders, employability, and work–life balance to reduce possible exploitation in this employment area. Focusing only on job features such as flexibility, autonomy, and rewards is insufficient to motivate and inspire meaningfulness among digital labourers. provide training focused on career adaptability. This may attract relevant talent and platforms may benefit from providing training opportunities in the long term.

Psychological job control has typically been negatively related to work-to-family and family-to-work conflict. Based on the job demand-resource model and boundary theory, we argue that psychological job control may indirectly be positively related to family-to-work conflict by both increasing supplemental work, that is, the rate of engagement in work outside of formal working hours without receiving compensation aided by mobile technology, and work-to-family conflict. We hypothesize that this proposed positive indirect relationship will be lower among employees who perceive a high segmentation norm at their workplace. Based on a two-wave study of 4518 employees, we obtained support for a serial moderated mediation model that suggests a dual effect of psychological job control on family-to-work conflict, such that psychological job control was positively associated with family-to-work conflict through supplemental work and work-to-family conflict at low levels of segmentation norms. By examining the dual effects of psychological job control, this study aims to further understand the mechanisms involved in determining whether and when psychological job control, together with supplemental work, encourages employees to uphold or cross boundaries between work and nonwork domains. Our findings imply that psychological job control can both be a resource and a demand depending on the levels of segmentation norms.