IT Professionals in the Gig Economy

Abstract

When IT work is performed through digital labor markets, IT professionals have a high degree of personal responsibility for their careers and must use appropriate strategies to be successful. This paper investigates the success of IT freelancers on digital labor platforms. Drawing on signaling theory, a dataset of 7166 IT freelancers is used to examine how activating, pointing, and supporting signals lead to success. Analysis was carried out using negative binomial regression. The results indicate that the three signaling types positively influence the objective career success of IT freelancers. This paper contributes to the literature by testing signaling theory in the new context of digital labor platforms, investigating IT specifics, and proposing support as a new type of signal for IT professionals on digital labor platforms. In practice, the results provide guidelines for IT freelancers to improve their success within their careers.

Socio‐technical issues in the platform‐mediated gig economy: A systematic literature review: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…We found seven articles that to varying degrees, touch on socio-technical issues in the gig economy, although four do so without labeling them as such. Gussek and Wiesche's (2022) review clarifies the "the forms and tasks of work in the gig economy" and calls for more research into crowdsourcing; they speculate that "the gig platform as a technology could become more autonomous and accordingly also take on a role as an actor in its own regard" (p. 12). Similarly, Stocker et al (2021) review literature on platform economics and regulation and discuss characteristics of the gig economy including trust and information asymmetries, reputation and rating systems, safety and security, and power.…”