Abstract
Abstract The 2007+ crisis led to an increase in occasional and task work, which unleashed the potential of new technological and organizational solutions. The advancements in digital technological platforms stimulated the growth of the segment referred to as gig economy. The article aims to apply a systematic approach to the driving forces behind the emergence of gig economy and its success to date and to assess its development prospects. It argues to confirm the thesis that gig economy has its own inherent logic, while it remains part of the multi-stage process of the evolution of employee-employer relations, from the industrial stage to the digital era to platform-mediated work. Based on the analysis of the current world literature, the article posits that gig economy, as the next stage of development, has significantly reduced the quality of work, but it may also not meet the individual needs of the contemporary consumer. This increases the likelihood of the need for its change. The article also envisages the direction of this change towards post-platform economy based on distributed market spaces and provides the characteristics of its determinants, including social capital and a sense of individual entrepreneurship. The primary methods used in the study involved analysis and critique of the current world literature as well as the method of analysis and logical construction.
Highlights
Since the onset of the 2007+ crisis, the popularity of occasional and task work has been on the increase worldwide, in the USA
The creators of digital technological platforms recognized that the new business model of the gig economy has the potential to achieve high profits by engaging service providers on conditions that ensure low average costs of universal service provision and, as a result, help gain competitive advantage over entities providing these services in the traditional manner
The system of engaging service providers is a basic element of the logic of the gig economy, which determines its competitiveness
Summary
Since the onset of the 2007+ crisis, the popularity of occasional and task work has been on the increase worldwide, in the USA. The stage in the development of the system of employee engagement, i.e. platform mediated work (gig economy), identified with crowdwork due to its mass scale, is the result of technological progress, which led to the emergence of a new work system in 2005–2007 (crowdwork in the strict sense of the word – Mechanical Turk – 2007) Despite technological advancements, it resembles the early phase of the industrial era, especially the Taylor model, characterized by extremely fragmented, narrowly specialized tasks (Jang, 2019) and can be treated as a variation of digital Taylorism (Altenried, 2020).
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