Workers of the Internet unite? Online freelancer organisation among remote gig economy workers in six Asian and African countries

The relationship between working in the "gig" economy and perceived subjective well-being in Western Balkan countries

The combination of accelerated digitalization and the recent COVID-19 crisis has increased the number of remote workers worldwide to unimaginable proportions. Among the large number of remote workers that execute their projects from home, there is a significant number of permanently self-employed remote workers, usually referred to as freelancers. Despite the importance of this kind of business activity for modern project management society, perceived drivers of freelancing are still unknown. The goal of this paper was to shed some light on the general subjective well-being of freelancing activity and investigate differences concerning gender, age, and education. The study was performed in late 2020 and included 471 freelancers from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro that participated in an online questionnaire evaluating their subjective well-being while participating in the "gig" economy. Factor analysis was used as a primary statistical method and two major groups were identified: (1) Impact of working from home on a freelancer's personal life and health and (2) Fulfillment of expectations in the economic and professional sense. Gender was found not to be significant for overall work satisfaction. However, older freelancers proved to be more satisfied with the fulfillment of economic and professional expectations, which correlate with years of professional experience. Another conclusion is that more educated freelancers are generally less satisfied with both groups of drivers - fulfillment of personal life and professional expectations. Understanding how the combination of occupations, technological infrastructure, and demographic characteristics in the region has affected the well-being of freelancers may help policymakers and organization owners, as well as future entrepreneurs, better prepare for this model of work in the future. It also increases the possibility of exploring individual dimensions of wellbeing useful for targeting interventions at the level of each country separately. In line with this, the present study contributes to the existing body of knowledge and the impact of hybrid models of work on the subjective well-being of workers in the "gig" economy.

On-call work and depressive mood: A cross-sectional survey among rural migrant workers in China

Introduction

With the rapid development of China's "gig economy," the on-call work model has grown increasingly prevalent in China and has attracted a large number of rural migrant workers with its low employment threshold. However, this irregular employment mode may negatively impact the mental health of workers.

Methods

This paper uses an ordinal logistic regression model to study the relationship between Chinese rural migrant workers' on-call work and their depression.

Results

The results showed that after controlling for relevant variables, the odds ratio of depressive mood among rural migrant workers engaged in on-call work was 1.22 (95% CI 1.04-1.43) compared with rural migrant workers who did not need to be on call. In further heterogeneity research, we found that on-call work is more likely to aggravate the depression risk of rural migrant workers who are highly dependent on the internet and have low-wage incomes.

Discussion

This research suggests that appropriate measures should be taken to mitigate the negative impact of on-call work on the mental health of rural migrant workers, and more attention needs to be paid to the mental health of lower salaried and gig workers. This paper provides a valuable sample of Chinese rural migrant workers for theoretical research on the relationship between on-call work and mental health and confirms the relationship between the two. These results contribute new ideas to the theory and practice of psychological crisis intervention aimed at Chinese rural migrant workers.

Gig Economy Riders on Social Media in Thailand: Contested Identities and Emergent Civil Society Organisations

The emergence of the gig economy has generated a new class of workers who are categorised as independent "partners" instead of employees with rights to labour protection. Triggered by observations of a protest movement by platform-based delivery riders in Thailand, we engaged in seven months of digital ethnographic research of riders' interactions online to understand the emergence of informal groups facilitating mutual aid and collective action. Civil society research has neglected to analyse such groups within the gig economy. The study finds that social media is a site for the development and contestation of identity narratives. We observed a "Hero" narrative that glorifies delivery riders' independent status and a "Worker" narrative that challenges riders' conditions. We argue that these collective identity narratives crucially facilitate or inhibit the emergence of labour-oriented civil society organisations, thus contributing to third sector research that examines civil society in the Global South.

Précarisation, gestion algorithmique et mobilisation: les effets de la pandémie de COVID‐19 sur les livreurs des plateformes numériques en Argentine et au Chili

Les auteurs analysent les effets de la pandémie sur le processus de travail au sein de deux plateformes de livraison alimentaire opérant en Argentine et au Chili, Rappi et PedidosYa. En s'appuyant sur des entretiens semi‐directifs et une analyse du discours de la presse et des sites Internet, ils montrent que les plateformes ont transféré les coûts induits par la crise sur les travailleurs en instru‐mentalisant le statut de travailleur indépendant et en renforçant leur contrôle. En réaction, les livreurs ont eu recours à de multiples stratégies de résistance, qui vont de la location ou du prêt de comptes à l'organisation de grèves internationales.

Chinese tourists in Nordic countries: An analysis of spatio-temporal behavior using geo-located travel blog data

Geo-located travel blogs, a new data source, enable to achieve more detailed analysis of tourists' spatio-temporal behavior. Taking Chinese tourists in Nordic countries as the research object, this paper focuses on their behavior, seasonal patterns and complex network effects by using geo-located travel blog data collected from Qunar.com. The results show that: (1) Chinese tourists visiting Nordic countries are often experienced in traveling. The local climate during the cold season does not prevent them from pursuing the aurora scenery. (2) The travel behavior of Chinese tourists is spatially heterogeneous. The network analysis reveals that Iceland showcases stronger, compared to the other Nordic countries, community independence and small world effect. (3) During the warm season, Chinese tourists choose a variety of destinations, while in cold season, they tend to choose destinations with higher chances for spotting the northern lights. These results provide helpful information for the tourism management departments of Nordic countries to improve their marketing and development efforts directed for Chinese tourists.

New Technology, Work and Employment in the era of COVID-19: reflecting on legacies of research

The outbreak of COVID‐19 is having a drastic impact on work and employment. This review piece outlines the relevance of existing research into new technology, work and employment in the era of COVID‐19. It is important to be retrospective and undertake both a historically and theoretically informed position on the impact of new technologies in the current crisis and beyond. Issues of control, surveillance and resistance have been central to work on the impact of technology on work and employment and these themes have been identified as central to the experience of work in the current crisis.

Individualism and Collectivism at Work in an Era of Deindustrialization: Work Narratives of Food Delivery Couriers in the Platform Economy

Supposedly emblematic of digital capitalism, the rise of the gig economy is frequently taken as a cipher for the developing deindustrialisation of western societies. It is tempting to interpret the shift of manufacturing jobs to the global south and their replacement with service sector jobs as a one-way street, leading to the demise of decent work and the rise of work characterized by precarity, low pay, low skill and a non-unionized workforce. However, the reality is inevitably more complex. In the first place, pessimism may be attributed to a rose-tinted view of the experience of former industrial employment in the global north resulting from a questionable assumption about the nature of the jobs that occupied most people in former industrial societies. Certainly, deindustrialisation is not leading to "de-working," that is, working less for the same money. With respect to gig work, autonomy and flexibility are central to labor inducement and hence labor control. Yet at the same time, and linked to the latter, we need to explore another deep-rooted phenomenon: the persistence of workspace collectivism. Our evidence derives from qualitative interviews with gig workers in the food delivery sector in a number of European countries. We highlight the extent to which couriers profess a variety of understandings of the character of platform economy labor processes. A range of narratives emerge including platform work as leisure, as economic opportunity, and as collectivist labor. Moreover, individuation, attendant upon the character of the physical labor process, did not lead in any straightforward way to individualism in social labor processes-contrary to our expectations, we in fact witnessed forms of collectivism. Collectivism is to be distinguished from "types of solidarity" described by Morgan and Pulignano (2020) whereby neo-liberalism has transformed a range of institutional forms of labor solidarities. By contrast, we are concerned with the persistence of the collective worker within the changing sociological structure of work. This echoes the earlier finding by Stephenson and Stewart (2001) that collectivism endures even when behaviourally absent and indeed even in the context of individualized working-termed "whispering shadow." Thus, the objective of the paper is to explore the forms of actor individualism and collectivism identified in our research. Given platform apps' external control, the gig economy spatially separates workers while at the same time requiring cognition of colleagues' collective work and labor process. Notwithstanding structural processes separating workers-in-work, platforms also witness the instantiation of forms of collectivism. Deindustrialisation is neither the end to collectivism nor trade unionism. Rather than post-work, then, we explore the problematics of plus work and variant collectivisms.

Gig-workers’ motivation: thinking beyond carrots and sticks

Purpose

High-quality employee motivation can contribute to an organization’s long-term success by supporting employees’ well-being and performance. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of research concerning how organizations motivate workers in non-traditional work contexts. In the algocratic context of the gig-economy, the purpose of this paper is to understand the role that technology can play in motivating workers.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on the self-determination theory, job-characteristic theory and enterprise social media research, this conceptual paper explores how the architecture of the digital labor platforms underlying the gig-economy (and the characteristics of jobs mediated through these IT artifacts) can impact key antecedents of self-motivation.

Findings

Combining theory and empirical evidence, this paper develops a mid-range theory demonstrating how organizations can support the self-motivation of gig-workers through the thoughtful design of their digital labor platforms and the integration of two social media tools (namely, social networking and social badging).

Research limitations/implications

This paper answers calls for psychologically-based research exploring the consequences of gig-work as well as research studying the impacts of advanced technologies in interaction with work contexts on motivation. In theorizing around a large set of social-contextual variables operating at different levels of analysis, this paper demonstrates that individual-level motivation can be influenced by both task-based and organizational-level factors, in addition to individual-level factors.

Originality/value

The proposed theory provides novel insight into how gig-organizations can leverage widely accessible social media technology to motivate platform workers in the absence of human supervision and support. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.