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Expanding perspectives on gig work and gig workers
The term “gig economy” was coined during the height of the great recession as a way to describe the increasing numbers of people, including the well-educated, who held multiple part-time jobs, were employed by temporary agencies or freelanced (Brown, 2009). These sorts of contingent work arrangements have long been studied by organizational researchers (Cappelli and Keller, 2013; Connelly and Gallagher, 2004). In the past several years, however, operational definitions of gig work have begun to converge on a more novel type of contingent labor: electronically mediated employment arrangements in which individuals find short-term tasks or projects via websites or mobile apps that connect them to clients and process payment. A variety of labor platforms now provide individuals the ability to choose when and whether to work, either remotely or in-person.
In this special issue we examine this form of gig labor: people who find work via digital labor platforms such as Upwork, Uber, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and TaskRabbit. These and other labor platforms vary substantially in terms of their target markets and configurations, but all serve as intermediaries between consumers/clients and individuals who provide services (note this excludes platforms where tangible goods are sold or rented, such as Etsy and Airbnb). Some people work full-time hours via one of these platforms for years while others use them as an occasional source of extra income. Technically speaking, they are considered self-employed even though the design and policies of many platforms can lead some workers to perceive themselves as employees of the platform (Smith, 2016). While most of the research to date on this phenomenon has been conducted by scholars in information systems, strategic management, sociology and economics (e.g. Chen and Horton, 2016; Friedman, 2014; Lehdonvirta, 2018; Lin et al., 2016; Pallais, 2014; Stewart and Stanford, 2017), electronically mediated gig employment poses provocative theoretical as well as important practical questions for organizational psychology and human resource management (HRM) (Aguinis and Lawal, 2013; Ashford et al., 2018; Kuhn, 2016). In this introductory editorial, we present an overview of gig economy work and highlight key issues from the perspective of managerial psychology; we also situate the papers included in the Special Issue relative to this overarching framework to...
