For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

"The future of work in the ‘sharing economy’. Market efficiency and equitable opportunities or unfair precarisation?"

by Codagnone, Cristiano; Abadie, Fabienne; Biagi, Federico (2016)

Abstract

This critical and scoping review essay analyses digital labour markets where labour-intensive services are traded by matching requesters (employers and/or consumers) and providers (workers). It focuses on digital labour markets which allow the remote delivery of electronically transmittable services (i.e. Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, Freelancers, etc.) and those where the matching and administration processes are digital but the delivery of the services is physical and requires direct interaction. The former broad type is called Online Labour Markets (OLMs) and is potentially global. The latter broad type is termed Mobile Labour Markets (MLMs) and is by definition localised. The essay defines and conceptualises these markets proposing a typology which proves to be empirically valid and heuristically useful. It describes their functioning and the socio-demographic profiles of the participants, reviews their economic and social effects, discusses the possible policy implications, and concludes with a research agenda to support European level policy making. It alternates the discussion of ‘hard’ findings from experimental and quasi-experimental studies with analysis of ‘softer’ issues such as rhetorical discourses and media ‘hyped’ accounts. This triangulation is inspired by, and a tribute to, the enduring legacy of the work of Albert O. Hirschman and his view that ideas and rhetoric can become endogenous engines of social change, reforms, and policies. This essay tries to disentangle the rhetoric with available empirical evidence in order to enable a more rational debate at least in the discussion of policies, if not in the public arena. To do so, an in depth analysis of 39 platforms was undertaken together with a formal review of 70 scientific sources. These two main sources have been integrated with:

Key Passage

As recounted by Schwartz (2015) in a piece tellingly titled ‘Human pretending to be computers pretending to be human’, in 1770 Wolfgang von Kempelen presented in Vienna to Empress Maria Theresa a sort of robot (see picture) that could beat humans at playing chess; he called it the ‘Turk’. The ‘Turk’ toured Europe and evoked contrasting responses, as some were ready to admit and welcome that machines were surpassing humans but many opposed this view. Although the Turk included a ‘labyrinth of levers, cogs and clockwork machinery’ obviously it was not using any algorithm and was operated by a person hidden inside. The first digital platform for the trading of micro-tasks, Amazon Mechanical Turk (henceforth simply MTurk), was presented as a new technology of ‘humans-as-aservice’ as opposed to ‘software-as-a-service’ and as a new form of ‘artificial intelligence’ (Irani, 2015b, p. 225). More recently engineers have brought this idea further by designing Soylent, ‘a word processor with a crowd inside’ that uses workers from MTurk to create a ‘human powered’ editor and writing assistant ‘inside’ MS Word (Bernstein et al., 2015). So one could wonder to what extent the future will be about robots supplanting humans or conversely about digital transformations turning humans into ‘robots’. (p.9)

Keywords

Platform Work, Platform Economies, Gig Economies, Hyperflexible Work, Algorithmic Labor, Precarious Work

Themes

Algorithms, Automation

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