Flexibility in the Gig Economy: Managing Time on Three Online Piecework Platforms

By Vili Lehdonvirta. 2018

445 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gig economy platforms seem to provide extreme temporal flexibility to workers, giving them full control over how to spend each hour and minute of the day. What constraints do workers face when attempting to exercise this flexibility? We use 30 worker interviews and other data to compare three online piecework platforms with differing histories and worker demographics: Mechanical Turk, MobileWorks, and CloudFactory. We find that structural constraints (availability of work and degree of worker dependence on the work), as well as cultural-cognitive constraints (procrastination and presenteeism), limit worker control over scheduling in practice. The severity of these constraints varies significantly between platforms, the formally freest platform presenting the greatest structural and cultural-cognitive constraints. We also find that workers have developed informal practices, tools, and communities to address these constraints. We conclude that focusing on outcomes rather than control is a more fruitful way to assess flexible working arrangements.

Subfields: Demography, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac4952b4d54946fc18a72c287bce9d302d950f15

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Citations in the corpus

Working on my own: Measuring the challenges of gig work (2021, background): “Some gig workers have a great deal of freedom to determine how and when they work, while others face more limited autonomy owing to the algorithms constructed to control their effort (Ashford et al., 2018; Lehdonvirta, 2018; Veen et al., 2020).”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, methodology): “Workers could thus gamble with their time, foregoing modest but certain rewards for a chance to earn bigger re-wards (Lehdonvirta, 2018).”
Labour process theory and the gig economy (2018, background): “…studied by Fleming and Sturdy (2011) can also be witnessed, whereby workers are subject to forms of forms of control that leverage on ‘gamified’ practices aimed at fostering the achievement of ‘personal bests’ to stimulate - and reward - a worker’s productive disposition (e.g. Lehdonvirta, 2018).”
From Flexible Labour to ‘Sticky Labour’: A Tracking Study of Workers in the Food-Delivery Platform Economy of China (2021, background): “Other studies have shown that the realisation of temporal flexibility is often constrained by structural factors that are out of individual workers’ control, such as the availability of work (Lehdonvirta, 2018) and workers’ limited collective bargaining power (Wood, 2016).”
What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy (2020, background): “…dependency status (i.e., how reliant platform workers are on their earnings to pay their basic living expenses) is a key determinant of outcomes (see also Forde et al. 2017, Kuhn & Maleki 2017, Lehdonvirta 2018, Manriquez 2019, Pesole et al. 2018, and Rosenblat 2018 for discussions of dependency).”
Automation, Algorithms, and Beyond: Why Work Design Matters More Than Ever in a Digital World (2020, background): “tasks with a very short cycle time, Lehdonvirta (2018) concluded that the degree of job autonomy depended on the particular platform and the choices made about the work organization.”
Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy (2018, unknown): “Thus it is possible for remote gig workers to value flexibility, even though its realisation is dependent upon plentiful demand (Lehdonvirta, 2018).”