Professional or Day Laborer?: A Relational View of Professional Work on Digital Platforms

Abstract

The rise of the “gig economy” and the technological advances in the use of digital platforms in mediating work have led to a rapid increase in the number of highly skilled professionals working as “online freelancers”. In this paper, we argue that the use of digital platforms for mediating freelancing goes far beyond just providing an online marketplace for matching freelancers with clients, it cuts deep into the very essence of professional work and has a direct impact on how professional work gets carried out. Based on interviews with 20 professionals who freelance through digital platforms (working as designers, writers, marketers, and IT administrators) and 19 clients, we explore how the use of digital platforms transforms the nature of relationships between professionals and their clients, their professional communities, and their work. Using labor process theory as a foundational framework, we assert that platform-mediated work introduces a new form of labor control, “relational control”, that online freelance workers learn to navigate and resist. The findings suggest that the technological features of the platform have a big impact on the social process of production.