Digital Work and the Platform Economy

Understanding Tasks, Skills and Capabilities in the New Era

Seppo Poutanen, Anne Kovalainen, Petri Rouvinen, Seppo Poutanen, Anne Kovalainen, Petri Rouvinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429886089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione dell'informazione
• Index: Business

"Uberization, " "digitalization, " "platform economy, " "gig economy, " and "sharing economy" are some of the buzzwords that characterize the current intense discussions about the development of the economy and work around the world, among both experts and laypersons. Immense changes in the ways goods are manufactured, business is done, work tasks are performed, education is accomplished, and so on, are clearly underway. This also means that demand for careful, first-rate social scientific analyses of the phenomena in question is rapidly growing.

This edited volume gathers distinguished researchers from economics, business studies, organization studies, medicine, social psychology, occupational health, pedagogics, and sociology to put particular work in both public and private sectors and education in both academic and vocational settings at the focus of the emerging digitalized platform economy. The authors anchor their analyses and conceptual and theoretical work in distinctive empirical developments that are taking place in one of the leading countries of digitalization processes: Finland. Finnish case studies reflect general global developments and show their particular, context-related actualization in multiple ways. This double exposure enables the authors of this multi- and interdisciplinary volume to advance conceptualization and theorization of the key phenomena in digitalizing platform societies in novel, creative, and groundbreaking directions. This book will without doubt be of great value to academic researchers and students in the fields of economics, business studies, work studies, social sciences, education, technology, digitalization, platforms, occupational health, entrepreneurship, and professions.

Part I

Introduction

Digital Work in the Platform Economy

Seppo Poutanen, Anne Kovalainen, and Petri Rouvinen

Introduction

This book is an outcome of three years of research on the different aspects of digital and platform work in this era of the platform economy. Over its 10 chapters, the volume takes an interdisciplinary approach, in which philosophy, economics, psychology, social psychology, sociology, education sciences, and public health are used and combined for analyzing the dimensions of digital work in the platform era. Based on both primary and secondary materials and sources, in-depth analyses of both qualitative and quantitative data, and several types of fieldwork materials, including seminars and policy briefs, the authors analyze the many current features of a working life where digitalization and new phenomena such as platform work are emerging. The common denominator for all chapters is examining the different facets of work in the era of digitalization and the platform economy.

By platform economy, most researchers refer to the birth and development of multisided markets, which can have direct (same side) and/or indirect (opposite side) network effects. Although there is no single agreed-upon definition of “platform economy”, the most common definition of platform economy describes platforms as digital market places where buyers and sellers meet. The more complex definition of platforms and platform economy takes into account the technical aspects of digital platforms that create new and change current economic and societal circumstances through technologies. New aspects of worker-employer relationships can be identified when looking at technology as more than just a platform enabler, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. The platformization of work—meaning work that is offered, accepted, and performed increasingly through digital platforms—in many cases also means the taskification of work. Taskification refers to piecemealing (slicing) work activity into smaller activities and tasks, which can, for example, be performed by AI. These tasks can partially be dissected from actual professional work (e.g. Susskind and Susskind, 2015). Taskification may dissect the familiar activities we often think of as ‘work’ or ‘professional work’.

The diversity of work arrangements, as a result of globalization and digitalization and their presence in the society and economy alike, mingled with the changing subjective notions of work, have raised questions on how we understand, examine, explain, and conceptualize work in the current platform era. Generally, work enhances innovation and common good and adds value to companies and corporations. Work also means income (i.e., living wage), but not necessarily for everybody. Work should mean equal, worthy living and thus refer to identity-related aspects and issues. However, work also maintains and sometimes reinforces unequal power relations. Further, it carries and rebuilds individual and societal social status and connects individuals to various social networks and social structures. New arrangements in the form of atypical jobs, for example, created and re-enforced by digitalization, carry the seeds of change for organizations and institutions alike. In this context, the platformization of work includes the taskification of work and jobs (Vallas and Kovalainen, 2019), but also platform-mediated expertise (e.g., Kane et al., 2019) that determines its shape and format.

In this volume, we focus on some of the changes brought on by the digitalization and platformization of work, and as a result, discuss some of the reasons why changes such as digitalization at large are relevant and important for the future theorization of platform work. Through detailed case study analyses using a variety of datasets, we shed light on the multitude of changes in contemporary working life. While many of the empirical cases originate in Finland, the conceptualizations used and many of the identified and analyzed features carry no national labels but are global in nature. Finland, as one of the Nordic welfare countries, offers some advantages for these multi-prism analyses of working life, such as access to reliable and robust data.

Given the diversity of sources for mapping out the contemporary changes in working life and the objectives of this book, we provide a multifaceted picture of the changes in the platform economy era, offering empirical evidence on key aspects. However, it is tempting to restrict “the researcher’s gaze” to analyses of digital work and the platform economy concerning only online gig workers, delivery riders, or new startups and entrepreneurs in the gaming industry. There is indeed an abundance of studies addressing these groups, for good reason, as these groups underline the novelty and importance of the topic. However, these examples do not give the full picture of the digital platform economy, which is currently developing and creating its framework. Our book thus takes a wider perspective, not limiting the analysis to one or two groups. The different aspects of the digital economy, which is at the core of most changes in current working life, are at the heart of this book.

Changing Work, Changing Categories

The classical research canon on work and employment provides limited support for understanding how platformization currently shapes the conditions and future of work and employment. The impacts of technology in general and of digitalization in particular are complex and do not “treat” work and jobs in a similar manner. While the platform economy is currently emerging and transforming work, there is no real basis to argue that all work is being transformed into tasks or becomes contingent (Susskind and Susskind, 2015; Sundararajan, 2015). Further, the changes that technologies bring are massive but very often gradual and invisible. In addition, they are adopted and implemented in institutions, organizations, and structures that often are not designed for rapid changes or development.

Despite the slow adoption of new technologies by organizations and institutions, we cannot avoid the intensity of the technology effects to the (a) content of work, (b) birth and death of work, and (c) transformations in work. Therefore, this edited volume includes several chapters addressing these three issues. Technology does not change the division between paid and unpaid work, but they change the very nature of unpaid work, relating it to those structural societal inequalities that are affected by technology in a myriad of ways. Therefore, even if the platform economy is still a relatively small part of developed countries’ economies, its impact ranges beyond national borders. Digital labor platforms transcend national borders, with many variations, online and offline work orders, and crowdsourcing platforms.

Indeed, the question is whether the division into “employed” and “self-employed” or “workers” and “entrepreneurs” necessarily relates to future types of contracts. The new forms of “dependent contractors” and “dependent own-account workers” no longer fit the subcontracting models of the industrial phase but, rather, require a new definition/classification based on the post-industrial and post-service taskification models of work, where the power relations between “contractors,” form and length (temporality) of tasks, and skills required are considered. However, the issues of the work and digital platform economy are topical and, therefore, the systematization of the various features of digital platform work is crucial for further analyses. Two of the chapters in this volume clarify the different types of digital and platform work by systematizing the new facets and features of work in general.

The argument is often that if the phenomenon of the digital platform economy is still minor (e.g., in comparison to normal employment), there should not be the need for new categorizations; then again, for example, new categorizations are too many to make a meaningful distinction between gig and platform workers (e.g., Eurofound, 2018). However, while the workforce may still be comparatively limited in this field, it disguises features becoming more common in the so-called “normal” work relationships. Being self-employed and an independent contractor is not a new feature, but having an app monitoring and regulating your “entrepreneurial freedom” certainly is.

In discussions, the assumption is often that many, if not most, of those who work using platforms are contingent workers (Wood et al., 2019). Contingent workers are those who do not have an implicit or explicit contract for ongoing employment. The share of contingent work has increased in Europe, with the share of such work being around 14% of the workforce, typically including more women than men and younger rather than older employees (Eurofound, 2017). The question is, how does Finland relate to the rest of Europe and to the United States? The types of work conducted as contingent work differ significantly, and alternative employment arrangements (online work) are not as frequent as in the United States. The share of temporary work in the United States is around 5% of the workforce, similar to European statistics (BSL, 2017). Further, the alternative employment arrangements in the United States (i.e., independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary help agency workers, and workers employed by contract companies) accounted for around 11% of all employees in 2017 (CPS, 2018). An emerging type of work, electronically mediated work, defined as short jobs or tasks that workers find through mobile apps that both connect them with customers and arrange payment for the tasks was measured in the United States in 2018 by Labor Statistics. According to the data, compared with workers in general, those who engaged in electronically mediated work were more likely to have a bachelor’s degree or higher (CPS, 2018). However, the discrepancy between the data on online gig workers and these statistics underlines different methodologies in the data collection.

In any case, electronically mediated and platform workers are not the only terms used for people who work under emerging contracts. Other terms are also used, such as “online gig workers,” “e-lancers,” “sharing economy workers,” “on-demand economy workers,” and “electronically intermediated workers,” among others. A key aspect is how to understand and relate this to the theorizing of work. The issues in the classifications of platform economy and platform work are complex and discussed in two chapters in this volume.

A more extensive comparison on the development of occupational structures, for example, reveals changes within occupational structures and, to an increasing degree, between occupations. The differences between occupational groups increase in the United States and Canada (Acemoglu and Autor, 2010) as well as in Europe (Goos et al., 2009), particularly so that the number of occupations with the lowest qualification levels increased. This polarization of occupations also became visible in Europe in the 2010s. A significant part of this polarization and the related changes have been accelerated not only by an increase in living standards, which has created new service sector occupations, but mostly by the development of technology, which has shifted routine and repeatable tasks to machines through automation. Occupational mobility, particularly upward, has nevertheless not grown. Specifically, studies of longtime series have shown the speed of technological development and its impact on occupations to have been slower than expected, especially over the past few decades (Atkinson and Wu, 2017). Given this development, platformization may also increase the digital divide.

As the platform economy is still seeking its shape, the exact projections of the number of individuals working on platforms and the nature of their work contracts are bound to be amiss. This may also concern the classification of individuals working for different platforms. The recent classifications of work in the platform (e.g., Kenney and Zysman, 2019), sharing (e.g., Sutherland and Hossein Jarrahi, 2018), and gig economies (Kalleberg and Dunn, 2016) relate the forms of work to control and the nature of platforms. However, platforms evolve and transform, and, hence, so does the work performed, its conditions, competition, and control mechanisms. Much of this shape seeking, however, is controversial and underlines the difficulty of capturing platforms and the effects of platform work: the changes in algorithms affect the compensation systems and the use of reputational algorithms, while legal and political struggles over regulatory policies shift the nature of operations.

An increasingly important part of the digitally wired platform economy is the increase in the outsourcing of the work at the corporate level that was previously performed “in-house” in corporations and in the public sector. Large corporations use startups for “trial-and-error” as a type of innovation-building activity, thus outsourcing part of their core functions. Therefore, the effects of digitalization, as evidenced in the studies on platform work and digitalization of work in this volume, are neither one-directional nor simplistic, but complex and multilayered.

It has been predicted—and highly criticized—that some human work will disappear (Frey and Osborne, 2017), and it has also been equally predicted that, rather than disappearing, a significant share of the work now performed by people will be carried out through automation or by robots and machines (Brynjolfsson and MacAfee, 2014), as the new machine age arrives. Although several studies have found that the globally transforming platform economy reduces human work and, in the future, will also eradicate certain types of work, technology also has its constant role to play in the creation of new work. As a result of digitalization, almost all work—and that carried out outside actual platform work—can be redefined and “taskified.” Taskification means work is divided into smaller units and tasks than before, some of which can be taken care of by algorithmic decision-making (e.g. Jacobs and Karen, 2019), while some of the tasks will continue to be performed by humans. Technological development and digitalization are thus bound to change the nature and content of work. This change will also produce weaker, diverging positions related to social security and, for example, occupational healthcare. Hence, several aspects to digitalization and changes in work in the platform era are needed, and this book aims to serve this purpose.

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Sundararajan, A. (2015). The Sharing Economy: The End of Employm...