One foot in the online gig economy: Coping with a splitting professional identity

Abstract

AbstractAs the online gig economy diffuses into professional fields, more workers now engage in online platforms alongside traditional offline practice. How do concurrent online and offline works challenge professional identity and how do workers cope with the challenges? This study inductively explores a qualitative dataset of lawyers who worked in online platform-based and conventional offline legal services at the same time. I found that the common features of online gig work (e.g. accessibility and affordability for customers, ratings, and reviews of workers) result in contradictions with traditional legal work in terms of work content and client relations. These differences caused an emerging split in lawyers’ professional identity—the coexistence of two somewhat contradictory sub-identities. The lawyers coped with the professional identity split in one of two ways: 1) alleviating the experienced severity of the split by using the tactics of framing and distancing from online work and tailoring online work content; 2) reconciling the split by reframing professional ideals based on their new understanding of being lawyers obtained from online work. Individual differences in professional identity constructed in traditional practice were found to underlie this identity dynamic: the lawyers’ expertise specialization and customer orientation explained the strength of professional split, and those who believed that the profession is highly dynamic and will experience dramatic future changes were inclined to reconcile professional identity split.