ABSTRACT Flexibility is the defining promise of the gig economy, yet also its central contradiction. Often framed as a benefit, flexibility operates dialectically, as both a mechanism of control and a potential site of agency. Workers’ ability to navigate or resist precarity is shaped by their position within segmented labour markets, their subjectivities, and broader socio-economic structures. The gig economy is not a single labour market, then, but a stratified one in which conditions vary drastically across sectors and worker groups. This paper examines two differently situated workers in distinct segments of gig work to explore the determinants of precarity. It identifies three key dialectical tensions: (1) flexibility as both freedom and control; (2) gig work as promizing autonomy but delivering insecurity; and (3) the gig economy as simultaneously embedded in and excluded from Sweden’s labour market model, undermining protections whilst reproducing exclusion. Through digital mediation, task atomization, and misclassification, gig work entrenches inequality in new ways. In Sweden, Europe’s most segregated labour market, the gig economy exacerbates existing divisions. Whilst some workers benefit, others, particularly racialized migrants, face deepened precarity and algorithmic discipline. Rather than disrupting hierarchies, Sweden’s gig economy reinforces them through new forms of segmentation and spatio-temporal discipline.

Purpose There is very minimal published research on Upwork as a platform; this article seeks to fill that gap. It also builds on the growing body of (auto)ethnographic scholarship about the gig economy and platform capitalism. The research was motivated by a desire to understand labour relations within informal academia: research and teaching that happens adjacent to formal institutions, mediated by the platform economy. This came about because of a period of unemployment and financial precarity for the researcher. Design/methodology/approach The researcher conducted a three-month autoethnography of the “freelancer marketplace” Upwork. This followed previous longer-term use of the platform. The three-month period included participant observation (of the self), discussions with colleagues and reflexive consideration of positionality and ethics. Findings The empirical findings suggest that large numbers of students and academics use platform services for the production of essays and articles. There exists a global Anglophone platform economy around formal academia on a large scale. The technical design and functionality of platforms mediate the worker experience in distinct ways, with implications for how we understand academia as an industry and as an endeavour. Originality/value There are two contributions. First, the article presents platform academia as intrinsic to institutional academia, rather than parasitic to it. Second, it reveals that the primary product of the academy is reputational, as in the recognition of expertise, rather than knowledge.

The article provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of the foundations of labor and business law in the United States as integral components of a federal legal system. It examines the sources of legal regulation, the interaction between federal and state legislation, and the role of case law in shaping legal practice. Particular attention is given to the “employment at will” doctrine as a defining feature of the American labor model, as well as to the mechanisms for protecting employees’ rights within the framework of federal statutes and supervisory agencies. The study also explores the principles of corporate regulation, legal forms of business organization, and the specific features of U.S. antitrust legislation. Special emphasis is placed on contemporary challenges related to economic digitalization, the expansion of the gig economy, the transformation of employment relations, and increasing regulatory scrutiny of large corporations. The article concludes that the American regulatory model combines a high degree of economic freedom with relatively limited social guarantees, ensuring labor market flexibility and a favorable investment climate, while significantly influencing the development of international legal standards in labor and business law.

Despite flexibility being central to the gig economy, platform businesses face challenges balancing operational needs with labor mobility. Through empirical analysis of China’s food delivery platforms, this study finds that professionally oriented couriers in the outsourced model, while viewing platform work as a steppingstone to formal employment and exhibiting higher exit intentions, simultaneously develop stronger organizational identification through identity-building strategies that produce a suppressing effect on turnover intentions. Analysis further reveals heterogeneous effects across economic dependency groups, with platform-dependent couriers more sensitive to work model influences. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in identifying organizational identification as the central mechanism through which platforms reconcile the tension between flexibility and stability. Through this mechanism, platforms achieve organizational management of labor mobility without altering the legal form of flexible employment. These findings provide new insights into labor relations transformation and management innovation in emerging economic forms.

The gig economy, marked by the rise of short-term contracts, freelance work, and platform-based jobs, has witnessed tremendous growth with the advent of technology, smartphone usage, and digital payment systems. Although the gig economy offers flexibility, independence, and economic benefits to individuals, especially the youth and educated workforce, the findings of the study indicate that gig workers are confronted with serious problems, such as income uncertainty, lack of fixed wages, high operational costs, absence of job and social security, long working hours, and limited career progression opportunities. The gig economy is just an additional source of economic benefits for the workers rather than an alternative to regular jobs. The objective of the current study is to examine the emergence and implications of the gig economy, with specific reference to the problems faced by gig workers in Coimbatore city and conclude that, although the gig economy is an important contributor to the creation of jobs, it is high time to bring reforms to provide sustainable and secure jobs to gig workers in the future. Key Words: Gig economy, Gig workers, Income uncertainty, Job security, Employment sustainability

Abstract The gig economy and freelance work have expanded rapidly due to technological advancements, digital platforms, and the growing demand for flexible work arrangements. Organizations increasingly rely on gig workers and freelancers to access specialized skills, reduce costs, and enhance operational efficiency. However, managing such a workforce presents challenges related to communication, engagement, performance evaluation, and legal compliance. This study examines the role of Human Resource (HR) management in effectively managing gig workers and freelancers. It focuses on key HR functions such as recruitment, onboarding, communication, performance management, compensation, and policy development. The research is based on primary data collected through a structured questionnaire from respondents including students, professionals, and individuals familiar with gig work. The findings highlight that HR plays a critical role in ensuring the effective integration and management of gig workers through clear policies, transparent communication, fair compensation, and efficient performance monitoring. While the gig economy offers benefits such as flexibility, cost savings, and access to diverse talent, it also presents challenges like job insecurity, communication gaps, and reduced organizational commitment. Overall, the study emphasizes the need for organizations to adapt and redesign HR strategies to manage gig workers effectively and ensure long-term sustainability in a dynamic work environment.

ABSTRACT The gig economy utilizes algorithmic management systems that frequently conflict with urban traffic regulations. Building on an inductive analysis of this systemic tension, this study develops the novel concept of “Performative Algorithmic Deviance” to explicate how Chinese food delivery riders rationalize rule deviation and negotiate their responsibility during social interactions. Utilizing reflexive thematic analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews, the research reveals that riders interpret traffic violations as rational economic adaptations to rigid platform time pressures. Furthermore, riders employ specific communicative strategies to legitimate their actions and mitigate blame when interacting with merchants, customers, and police. The discussion argues that digital platforms create structural conditions that strongly incentivize deviance, prompting workers to strategically prioritize efficiency over safety to survive economically while the platform privatizes the associated legal risks.Ultimately, this work theorizes how riders embody and socially manage the conflict between digital imperatives and physical laws within a mediatized labor environment.

Drivers’ safety and security in the gig economy: A content analysis of media reports in Ghana

Turnover intentions among gig workers: A job demands and resources perspective.

Rethinking business education for the gig economy: The Flex-Aware Framework for responsive teaching

The gig economy has emerged as a rapidly expanding segment of the global labour market, transforming traditional employment patterns and creating new forms of work based on short-term, task-based engagements. In India, the growth of digital platforms, increased smartphone penetration, and widespread internet access have significantly accelerated the expansion of gig employment. The gig workforce in India has grown steadily in recent years, with estimates indicating that around 7.7 million workers were engaged in gig work during 2020–21, and the number is expected to reach approximately 23.5 million by 2029–30. Several sectors such as retail trade, transportation and storage, manufacturing, financial and insurance services, and information and communication have experienced considerable growth in gig employment. The present study examines the growth of the gig workforce in India and analyzes the opportunities and challenges associated with gig employment. The study also explores the concept and characteristics of gig work and evaluates the sector-wise expansion of gig workers using secondary data from various reports and studies. The findings reveal that the gig economy has created significant employment opportunities, especially for youth, women, and individuals seeking flexible working arrangements. The study concludes that while the gig economy has strong potential to contribute to employment generation and economic growth in India, sustainable development of this sector requires balanced policies that support both platform innovation and worker welfare. Strengthening social security provisions, ensuring fair working conditions, and promoting skill development will be crucial for improving the livelihood security of gig workers in India.

The rapid growth of digital technologies and the evolution of the "gig economy" have created unprecedented opportunities for online freelance work. Many individuals prefer freelancing because it provides flexibility, autonomy, and the ability to collaborate with global clients regardless of geographic location. However, connecting freelancers and clients efficiently requires more than just a simple interface; it necessitates a robust, secure, and well-structured digital marketplace. This paper presents the comprehensive development of "Freelance Market," a web-based micro-task marketplace designed using the Django web framework. The platform enables freelancers to create service listings known as "gigs," while providing clients with a streamlined interface to browse, hire, and manage professional services. Key features include skill verification badges, an automated earnings dashboard, a leaderboard system for quality control, and secure payment processing via thirdparty integrations. The system architecture follows the Model-View-Template pattern, ensuring scalability and security. This study details the system's design, the socioeconomic context of digital labor platforms, and the technical implementation of micro-task management. Results indicate that the proposed system effectively reduces transactional friction and improves the trustbuilding process between independent contractors and service buyers.

Digitalization and the growth of informal employment are fundamentally transforming the labor market in postSoviet cities, increasing social polarization and undermining traditional institutions of social protection. The present study considers Almaty as a representative megacity, which focuses on both global trends in the gig economy and local challenges to institutional adaptation. The purpose of the study is to analyze how digital platforms and hybrid forms of employment affect the structure of the urban labor market and the reproduction of social inequality. The theoretical framework includes the concepts of platform capitalism, dual labor market, digital neoliberalism and urban stratification. The research methodology combines bibliographic analysis, interpretation of statistical data (BNS RK, OECD), as well as analysis of institutional documents and cases of labor conflicts. It was revealed that as of the first quarter of 2025, 23.1% of all employed in Kazakhstan (2.2 million people) are self-employed, while the unemployment rate of 4.6% remains sluggish amid the growth of unstable forms of work. Protest activity in the platform sector (Wolt, Yandex Go) indicates an increase in social tension.The results confirm the formation of a class of “digital precariat” of institutionally unprotected workers involved in the digital economy. The practical significance of the research is in the development of recommendations for state policy in the field of regulating platform employment, modernizing social protection and sustainable development of the urban labor market in the context of digital capitalism.

The rapid expansion of gig economy has indeed been able to transform the traditional market. The businesses today are bound to function in an extremely dynamic environment, which we can call the VUCA world. Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity is no more a buzz world but many adaptive responses to it are growing. One such kind of economy is the gig economy where the workers are paid “per task” or “per gig”. This comes as a contrast to the traditional economy where the Human Resources’ jobs were relatively stable, compensation regulated and they were protected by some social security that saved them in various contingencies of life. Not just this, the shift from traditional approach to algorithm-based control from human control has also caused structural changes in this sector in the Human Resource Management practices. As Gig economy, both platform and non- platform continues to grow, the Human resource management practices have to be introspected minutely for its inclusivity and sustainable viability in both economic and social terms.

Digital platforms have reshaped labour markets worldwide, increasing gig work opportunities, particularly for motorbike delivery riders in South Africa, a country grappling with high unemployment. However, these self-employed workers often face a lack of job security, benefits, and protections due to informality, weak labour laws, and deep socioeconomic inequality, highlighting the contrast with the International Labour Organisation’s decent work principles. This research explores the work experiences of platform-based motorbike delivery riders in South Africa, aiming to improve our understanding of platform-based work and decent work experiences in the gig economy. Within a constructivist paradigm, this study adopted a qualitative descriptive design to investigate the experiences of motorbike delivery riders in Gauteng, South Africa, with ten participants each undergoing two interviews. The data were analysed through hybrid thematic analysis. Findings reveal that precarious gig conditions and structural inequalities influence rider’s experiences of decent work, which can be categorised into three interconnected decent work themes: (1) safety and healthcare, (2) income security, and (3) work–life balance. This research underscores the need for context-sensitive applications of the psychology of working theory, acknowledging the complex interplay of economic constraints, access to decent work, and the fulfilment of psychological needs in the gig economy.

The Indian gig economy relies heavily on taxi applications, yet drivers face severe issues regarding commissions and payments, often voicing grievances on the Google Play Store. Manual analysis of these high-volume, mixed-language reviews is inefficient, leading to driver dissatisfaction and attrition.To resolve this, we propose the AI-Powered Driver Grievance Detection System. Bypassing public datasets,we scraped 11,663 raw reviews from the Play Store, resulting in 11,240 clean, high-quality records after removing duplicates and noise. Natural LanguageProcessing (NLP) techniques, including noise removal and lowercase conversion, were applied, followed byTF-IDF vectorization to extract mathematical feature representations. We evaluated four machine learning classifiers—Logistic Regression, Multinomial NaiveBayes, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM)—using an 80-20 train-test split. The SVMnclassifier outperformed the others, achieving the highest accuracy of 90.08% in separating serious grievances from normal feedback. This automated text classification framework allows taxi platforms to rapidly identify and address specific driver problems, effectively reducing preventing driver churn. administrative delays and Keywords: Gig Economy, Machine Learning, Driver Grievance, Natural Language Processing, Support Vector Machine, TF-IDF Vectorization, Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification.

IntroductionThe maternal identity development, known as matrescence, of people engaged in sex work has been largely overlooked. Legal system involvement and social discrimination may have disruptive impacts on their developmental experience of becoming a mother. The EMERGE Study (Exploring Maternal Experiences and Reproductive Identities in the Sexual Gig Economy) explored factors such as maternal identity and maternal mental health needs among sex-working moms across the US. MethodsSix former and current sex workers and victims of commercial sexual exploitation who identified as mothers or maternal figures (hereafter referred to as sex-working moms, MSW) participated in semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews. ResultThese MSW detailed their experiences with motherhood and how stigma, discrimination, family policing, incarceration, and surveillance negatively impacted their mental health, maternal identity, and sense of self as a mother. The results demonstrate the harms that the legal system has on sex workers’ maternal psychological wellbeing as well as their identity as mothers. DiscussionRecommendations include amplifying positive formations of maternal identity which may improve maternal mental health outcomes among sex-working moms.

Ride-sourcing platforms such as Uber and Lyft are prime examples of the gig economy, recruiting drivers as independent contractors, thereby avoiding legal and fiscal obligations. Although platforms offer flexibility in choosing work shifts and areas, many drivers experience low income and poor working conditions, leading to widespread strikes, protests and lawsuits against the platforms. In response, minimum wage regulation is adopted to improve drivers’ welfare. However, the impacts of this regulation on drivers as well as on travelers and platforms, remain largely unknown. While ride-sourcing platforms do not disclose the relevant data, state-of-the-art models fail to explain the effects of minimum wage regulation on market dynamics. In this study, we assess the effectiveness and implications of minimum wage regulation in ride-sourcing markets while simulating the detailed dynamics of ride-sourcing markets under varying regulation intensities, both with and without the so-called platform lockout strategy. We apply the model to Amsterdam due to the availability of detailed travel-demand data; while the framework is transferable to other cities, the magnitude of the results may vary with local market conditions. Our findings reveal that minimum wage regulation impacts substantially drivers income but may also lead to higher fares for travelers and threaten platforms’ survival. When platforms adopt a lockout strategy, their profitability significantly improves and drivers earn even more, although many others lose their jobs, and service level for travelers consequently declines. These findings highlight the complex trade-offs involved in regulating ride-sourcing market.

Despite considerable research interest in the information technology (IT)-enabled gig economy, studies have yet to be carried out to systematize the skills required and formulate an overall model of competencies needed for gig-based IT professionals/representatives to be successful. Using dynamic skill theory, this study sought to provide an in-depth comprehension of the skills required to realize a booming gig economy. The systematic literature review was limited to quality, peer-reviewed studies carried out between 2013 and 2023 in sub-Saharan Africa. This review revealed that although both soft skills and hard skills are required, the current situation in southern Africa demands more soft skills. Drawing on findings from a systematic literature review, the study unravels usable vital skills to achieve a sustainable and viable gig economy in southern Africa. The authors' integrated framework provides insights into the nature of the skills required to navigate the burgeoning IT-enabled gig economy, thereby playing a catalytic role in achieving the sustainable development goal of eliminating poverty.

The fast growth of digital labour platforms has altered the nature of employment relations, and however, the introduction of new algorithmic governance mechanisms that determine the experience of gig workers. In this study, issues of algorithmic control, rating pressure, uncertainty in income, intensive monitoring, and gaps in governance are studied in relation to trust perception and consequently on job satisfaction and work wellbeing among gig workers. Based on a quantitative design and survey data of 310 platform workers in Bangalore, India, the study conducts the test on the proposed relationships using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results show that the platform governance mechanisms do have a great impact on trust perception, and monitoring intensity and algorithmic control have a significant effect. The perception of trust is a strong predictor of job satisfaction and work well-being, which proves its mediating impact in platform-based working conditions. The findings also point out that clear algorithms, equitable governance systems, and stability in income are crucial in achieving trust and enhancing performances among workers. The research paper adds value to the body of research on the gig economy because it shows that platform governance based on trust is a key factor in sustainable and fair digital labour.