Youth, enterprise and precarity: or, what is, and what is wrong with, the ‘gig economy’?
By R. MacDonald, A. Giazitzoglu. Journal of Sociology, 2019
153 citations recorded by the source corpus.
By taking an historical perspective, and by drawing on our own empirical work from the UK in the 1980s and more recently, we argue three main things. First, we need to understand the particular conditions of ‘the gig economy’ as a concentrated form of a more general de-standardisation of employment that has brought multiple forms of insecure work. Second, although there is clamour and excitement about ‘the gig economy’ in fact it shares strong parallels with earlier forms of insecure enterprise. Third, while not uniform nor as yet fully empirically demonstrated, young adults’ encounters with the ‘gig economy’ and other aspects of the contemporary labour market (such as the ‘low-pay, no-pay’ cycle, self-employment, ‘zero-hours contracts’) appear to be typified by a lack of choice and control, and experiences of disempowerment, low pay, degraded work conditions, alienation, anxiety and insecurity. This stands at odds with more celebratory proclamations about ‘the gig economy’.
Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43069676c0992e16d8d68af7768ec8d8cdf4868c
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In General Health Professions
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The organisation and experience of work in the gig economy (2019, background): “This situation is compounded by a lack of awareness among workers regarding the status of their contract (MacDonald and Giazitzoglu, 2019).”