What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy

By Steven P. Vallas, J. Schor. The Annual review of sociology, 2020

993 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rapid growth of the platform economy has provoked scholarly discussion of its consequences for the nature of work and employment. We identify four major themes in the literature on platform work and the underlying metaphors associated with each. Platforms are seen as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, accelerants of precarity, and chameleons adapting to their environments. Each of these devices has limitations, which leads us to introduce an alternative image of platforms: as permissive potentates that externalize responsibility and control over economic transactions while still exercising concentrated power. As a consequence, platforms represent a distinct type of governance mechanism, different from markets, hierarchies, or networks, and therefore pose a unique set of problems for regulators, workers, and their competitors in the conventional economy. Reflecting the instability of the platform structure, struggles over regulatory regimes are dynamic and difficult to predict, but they are sure to gain in prominence as the platform economy grows.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/271690a646b29b26e82362522b572b4a2481b0f2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Paul Glavin
2. B. Caza
3. Susan J. Ashford
4. Erin Reid
5. Scott Schieman

In Marketing

1. B. Caza
2. Steve Granger
3. U. Rani
4. P. Sun
5. Julie Yujie Chen
6. Susan J. Ashford
7. Erin Reid

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Scott Schieman
2. Paul Glavin
3. Susan J. Ashford
4. Erin Reid
5. Steve Granger
6. A. Bierman
7. B. Caza
8. U. Rani

Citations in the corpus

• Working on my own: Measuring the challenges of gig work (2021, background): “Even when controlling for gig-income dependence, which has been suggested to be a factor shaping gig workers’ experiences (Kuhn and Maleki, 2017; Vallas and Schor, 2020), those who earned the least overall reported higher levels of the challenges than did those who earned the most.”
• Über-Alienated: Powerless and Alone in the Gig Economy (2021, background): “This distancing ensures the primacy of the platform’s position as intermediary (Vallas & Schor, 2020), much in the same way that temporary staffing 406 Work and Occupations 48(4) agencies seek to prevent clients from directly hiring temporary workers (Elcioglu, 2010).”
• From Flexible Labour to ‘Sticky Labour’: A Tracking Study of Workers in the Food-Delivery Platform Economy of China (2021, background): “…platforms to WeChat differs from the control regime of the platform work that is characterised by externalising responsibilities and risks (Vallas and Schor, 2020) in that the food-delivery platforms exploit the stickiness of WeChat and entrap couriers into a wider mediated labour control…”