Online, on call: the spread of digitally-organised just-in-time working and its implications for standard employment models

Ursula Huws, Neil Spencer, Dag Sverre Syrdal

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Citations (Scopus)
285 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non-standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT-related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)113-129
Number of pages17
JournalNew Technology, Work and Employment
Volume33
Issue number2
Early online date4 Jul 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Jul 2018

Keywords

  • crowd work
  • just-in-time labour
  • online labour
  • platform labour
  • standard employment model
  • survey
  • varieties of capitalism
  • work organisation

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