The rapid growth of Uber and analogous platform companies has led to considerable scholarly interest in the phenomenon of platform labor. Scholars have taken two main approaches to explaining outcomes for platform work—precarity, which focuses on employment classification and insecure labor, and technological control via algorithms. Both predict that workers will have relatively common experiences. On the basis of 112 in-depth interviews with workers on seven platforms (Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Turo, Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and Favor) we find heterogeneity of experiences across and within platforms. We argue that because platform labor is weakly institutionalized, worker satisfaction, autonomy, and earnings vary significantly across and within platforms, suggesting dominant interpretations are insufficient. We find that the extent to which workers are dependent on platform income to pay basic expenses rather than working for supplemental income explains the variation in outcomes, with supplemental earners being more satisfied and higher-earning. This suggests platforms are free-riding on conventional employers. We also find that platforms are hierarchically ordered, in terms of what providers can earn, conditions of work, and their ability to produce satisfied workers. Our findings suggest the need for a new analytic approach to platforms, which emphasizes labor force diversity, connections to conventional labor markets, and worker dependence.

The “sharing economy” has become highly contentious. This chapter takes a broad view, addressing key issues in ongoing debates: terminology, participation, experiences, regulation, discrimination, and inequality. High cultural capital (HCC) participants, who are the majority, see themselves creating a virtuous moral alternative to the conventional market. However, their activities increasingly take place on large for-profit platforms that are resulting in a series of undesirable outcomes. These include pervasive racial and class discrimination, and the generation of inequality. The two largest platforms (Airbnb and Uber) have had adverse effects on urban housing and transportation, which have been the subject of recent regulatory efforts. Ultimately, the dynamism of the sharing economy, and the lack of fixed institutions, norms, and participants, means consumer researchers should be asking critical questions about the sector, its claims of common good, and its impact on social life.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a contested realm, with critics arguing it represents a further development of neoliberalism, as platforms such as Airbnb and TaskRabbit, monetize previously uncommodified realms of life via renting of bedrooms, possessions, space and labor time. To date, this debate has largely ignored participants’ views. Using data from 120 in-depth interviews with providers in two for-profit and three not-for-profit sites, we find that most see the sharing economy differently, as an opportunity to build a radically different market, from the bottom up. Like the detractors, they are critical of dominant market arrangements, however, they believe the sharing sector can construct personalized exchanges that are morally attuned, based on ideals of community, and that help them achieve creative and financial autonomy in their working lives. These aspirations represent an attempt to tame, or domesticate the neoliberal market.

Since 1981 close to forty countries have introduced systemic pension reforms that have replaced all or part of prior pay-as-you-go (PAYG) schemes with privately managed funded defined contribution (FDC) pillars or systems. However, over the past decade about half of these countries have subsequently cutback on, or entirely eliminated, these FDC schemes. In this article we explore some of the reasons why this reversal is often taking place in developing countries. As part of our analysis we propose a new pension reform typology that goes beyond the commonly used dichotomy between PAYG and pension privatization. We identify and discuss four factors that are of particular relevance to those seeking to understand the pension policy reversals that have been taking place in many developing countries: low pension coverage and incentive incompatibility, triple burden costs, tradeoffs between pension reforms and social pensions, and difficulties with annuitization.

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