Gig Workers: A Paradigm Shift in the Indian Workforce—A Bibliometric Analysis and Future Directions

Abstract

Gig workers across India seem to be looming large. Though it is in its infancy stage, it has led to millions of jobs being created for workers. It can penetrate Indian urban towns and cities, connecting workers with consumers and clients. Currently, the gig-platform economy is aiming to unfold a paradigm shift. The gig-workers number is on the rise, but its nature happens to be temporary. Technology advancement linked to Industry 4.0, the global financial crisis of 2007–2009, and the Coronavirus-2019 abnormal emergency have led the gig economy to grow faster. The workforce is currently about 8 million in 2020–2021, found in India being employed, which which eventually increase. A bibliometric analysis is adopted in this study. Out of 247 documents retrieved, ranging from 2009 to 2022, 242 papers from Scopus were considered. Data visualization and quantitative analysis were done using VOSviewer and RStudio. Top cited countries, research contribution of countries, authors impact, most global cited documents, and journal impact are the analyses carried out using RStudio. Apart from this quantitative analysis, the findings of 11 articles were synthesized and tabulated. The overlay visualization of keywords revealed that a shift is taking place from digital platforms like information systems, information use, gamification, and crowdsourcing to COVID-19, workers, psychology, and human experiments. The keywords like “Employment”, “Workers”, “Human”, “Gig Economy”, and “HRM” have the highest frequency in the “word cloud”. Thus, human aspects like recognition, rewards, and health protections ought to be given importance for the work they are doing.