Digital Economy and Digital Labour Terminology: Making Sense of the 'Gig Economy', 'Online Labour', 'Crowd Work', 'Microwork', 'Platform Labour', Etc.

Heeks, Richard

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3431728

Cited by 19 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…However, the information-based economy is altering the meanings of employment, work and workplaces, and how the labour process is organised (Gandini, 2019), as a significant amount of work is now being done on digital work platforms (Graham and Anwar, 2019a, 2019b, 2018). These digital workplaces now boast of an estimated 70 million workers doing a variety of tasks (Heeks, 2017). The gig economy is now characterised by short-term and contractual employment relations, workers are atomised and the labour process is controlled remotely (Gandini, 2019).…”

Section: Conceptualising Agency In Gig Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 1 We use the term ‘gig economy’ to refer to the prevalent phenomenon of work being transacted through online platforms. Conceptually, we acknowledge a range of competing understandings of the gig economy (see Heeks, 2017), but we stress explicitly the geographical and digital focus of the term and distinguish between two types of gig work: ‘remote work’ that is geographically untethered (e.g. transcription and graphic design via platforms such as Upwork) and ‘place-based work’ which is geographically sticky and performed locally by workers but may not be digitally intensive (e.g.…”

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Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers

2019

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In this article, we examine how remote gig workers in Africa exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods in the gig economy. In addition to the rewards reaped by gig workers, they also face significant risks, such as precarious working conditions and algorithmic workplace monitoring, thus constraining workers’ autonomy and bargaining power. Gig workers, as a result, are expected to have fewer opportunities to exert their agency – particularly so for workers in Africa, where the high proportion of informal economy and a lack of employment opportunities in local labour markets already constrain workers’ ability to earn livelihoods. Instead, we demonstrate how remote workers in Africa manage various constraints on one of the world’s biggest gig economy platforms through their diverse everyday resilience, reworking and resistance practices (after Katz, 2004 ). Drawing from a rich labour geography tradition, which considers workers to ‘actively produce economic spaces and scales’, our main theoretical contribution is to offer a reformulation of Katz’s notions of ‘resistance’, ‘resilience’ and ‘reworking’ as everyday practices of gig workers best understood as ‘hidden transcripts’ of the gig economy ( Scott, 1990 ). The article draws on in-depth interviews (N=65) conducted with remote workers during the fieldwork in five selected African countries.

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Section: Conceptualising Agency In Gig Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers

2019

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“…Moreover, future research could assess whether there was an uptick in the creation of new crowd worker accounts during the pandemic as jobs shifted to “work-from-home” models and workers were laid off from their jobs temporarily and permanently. 11 Even before the pandemic, crowd work belonged to a broader pattern of transition into precarious, flexible work arrangements, that is, the “gig economy” (see De Stefano 2015; Heeks, 2017; Duggan et al, 2020). If crowd working communities continue to grow in size and scope, there could be a positive spillover effect for academic researchers regarding the diversity of subject populations and the availability of treatment-naïve participants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research: Methodological, Fair, and Political Considerations

Rea

Kleeman

Zhu

et al. 2020

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society

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Crowdsourcing platforms are powerful tools for academic researchers. Proponents claim that crowdsourcing helps researchers quickly and affordably recruit enough human subjects with diverse backgrounds to generate significant statistical power, while critics raise concerns about unreliable data quality, labor exploitation, and unequal power dynamics between researchers and workers. We examine these concerns along three dimensions: methods, fairness, and politics. We find that researchers offer vastly different compensation rates for crowdsourced tasks, and address potential concerns about data validity by using platform-specific tools and user verification methods. Additionally, workers depend upon crowdsourcing platforms for a significant portion of their income, are motivated more by fear of losing access to work than by specific compensation rates, and are frustrated by a lack of transparency and occasional unfair treatment from job requesters. Finally, we discuss critical computing scholars’ proposals to address crowdsourcing’s problems, challenges with implementing these resolutions, and potential avenues for future research.

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“…the informal economy, which is where the majority of the working population of Nigeria find work. In so doing, we respond to the problem of “universalism,” as posited by Heeks (2017a) and D’Cruz and Noronha (2016) who argued that labour markets and labour market institutions in L&LMICs are typically quite different to those in developed economies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The gig economy—a free market system in which employers contract independent workers for short‐term engagements through virtual platforms—is the most common form of online labour (Collier et al, 2017; Heeks, 2017a). Often associated with the casualization of the workforce, gig work has recently captured the attention of both the researchers and the policy‐makers, following the escalating protests of Uber and Deliveroo drivers in both Europe and North America (Aloisi, 2016; Fleming, 2017; Marcano, 2018; Prassl, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Offline contexts of online jobs: Platform drivers, decent work, and informality in Lagos, Nigeria

Cieslik

Banya²,

Vira

2022

Development Policy Review

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Motivation:The Sustainable Development Goals targets include decent work for all by 2030 but progress in sub-Saharan Africa has been slow. Over the past five years, the platform work sector (e-hailing platforms in particular) has expanded considerably on the continent, providing work opportunities to the growing urban populations. The quality of this work, however, is heavily contested. Purpose: We deepen and extend our understanding of the gig economy in sub-Saharan Africa and assess its potential for creating decent work. Our unique contribution lies in looking at the gig economy in comparison to the local threshold (the informal economy) as opposed to wage employment. Methods and approach:We first review the literature on the gig economy, the informal sector, and decent work in low-and lower-middleincome countries. We then draw on a case study of e-hailing in Lagos, Nigeria, to assess the sector's potential to create decent work. We discuss our findings against the four pillars of the International Labour Organization's Decent Work Agenda: productive employment, labour standards, social protection, and social dialogue. Findings: We find that e-hailing platforms may offer certain gains compared to regular taxiing in the informal sector but these are context-and platform-specific. Examples include access to insurance, credit, and cash transfers. Gig work remains embedded in the informal economy: it is unregulated and does not abide by labour standards nor offer social protections. We also find evidence of well-organized labour movements. Policy implications: E-hailing may be productive work, as platform intermediation facilitates outreach and matching, translating into increased wages. This happens with the added cost of longer working hours in the absence of labour standards. We propose exploring the role of digital records kept by platforms (e.g. income volume and regularity, or customer ratings data) to facilitate the progressive transition of transport workers towards formality. We also recommend fostering industry standards (such as fair work certification) to protect workers' rights.

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Digital Economy and Digital Labour Terminology: Making Sense of the 'Gig Economy', 'Online Labour', 'Crowd Work', 'Microwork', 'Platform Labour', Etc.

Abstract: The Development Informatics working paper series discusses the broad issues surrounding digital data, information, knowledge, information systems, and information and communication technologies in the process of socioeconomic development Paper No. 70

Cited by 19 publications

References 2 publications

Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers

Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers

Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research: Methodological, Fair, and Political Considerations

Offline contexts of online jobs: Platform drivers, decent work, and informality in Lagos, Nigeria

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