The Gig Economy: A Researcher’s Perspective on What It Is and Why It’s Important
The gig economy has been a popular topic across the media and in academia for the past few years. It has been lauded in research “as the vanguard of a new era in work and employment that brings about new business models and mega platform-organizations”.
The gig economy has been growing for the past couple of decades. It has enabled organizations to be more nimble and adaptable in the face of changing market conditions. And workers have also increasingly sought the flexibility and adaptability of gig work. Reflecting this new era, a study of the US independent workforce found that 59 million Americans participated in the gig economy in 2021, representing more than one-third (36%) of the US workforce.
As more individuals turn to the gig economy, understanding work and modern employment practices becomes more and more important. This post provides a research-based overview of the gig economy: including some definitions and a discussion of why digitally-mediated gig work and the broader gig economy continue to matter.
The Gig Economy Defined
The term gig economy can be broadly defined as “a system of flexible, on-demand, and transient work arrangements”. This definition is useful as it highlights the tensions visible in much of the gig economy — the opportunities and challenges that come with temporary and independent gig work. This definition also signals that the gig economy is made up of an ecosystem of actors — including workers, consumers, and intermediary technologies that enable these working arrangements. That is, the gig economy “is generally characterized by short-term engagements among employers, workers, and customers”.
Gig work is not new, existing for over a century before the use of digital platforms like Uber, Lyft and others. Before the rise of digital platforms, musicians and other artists performed work on a contingent basis — they were a part of the offline gig economy. Yet (according to Kalleberg and Dunn, 2016) the gig economy exists today as a digital, and expanded, version of the “atypical, casual, freelance, or contingent work arrangements characteristic of much of the economy prior to the middle of the twentieth century”.
Digital Work Platforms
Various definitions of the ‘gig economy’ (including ones by Anwar et al, 2021 and Kinder et al., 2019) also emphasize the computer-mediated nature of the gig economy. This is because central to this work ecosystem are a range of digital platforms that enable work and entrepreneurial activity.
Digital work platforms provide a space where the critical aspects of the gig economy take place. Examples of these intermediary platforms include popular matching services like Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit. Digital work platforms also include those for conducting remote, location-independent tasks/projects, including Amazon Mechanical Turk (aka AMT/mTurk), Fiverr, 99designs, and Upwork.
Each of these work platforms provides its own set of rules and processes, enabling a transaction between workers and consumers. However, what they have in common is that they all rely on algorithmically-driven systems which are core to each platform’s transactions.
Should We Continue to Care about the Gig Economy?
I continue to research gig work because this form of work and the many digital platforms facilitating it don’t seem to be going away any time soon. In fact, career trajectories are shifting, and many individuals are no longer climbing the corporate ladder at a single organization or building life-long careers in a single industry. Instead, work is being fractured into projects and tasks. This means workers are competing for projects — not jobs or careers — across various companies and industries, and many of these work transactions are facilitated by digital platforms.
Due to the large number of individuals participating in today’s digitally-mediated gig economy, what is critical is to: 1) understand the implications of gig work, 2) investigate the digital platforms facilitating this work and 3) continue to highlight the experiences of workers who continue to take part in the gig economy. Only then can we begin to truly understand the gig economy and find ways to improve the conditions for the workers in this new era of gig work.
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