Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 402

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Workers of the Internet unite? Online freelancer organisation among remote gig economy workers in six Asian and African countries

Open access
Wood, Alex J., Lehdonvirta, Vili, Graham, Mark·2018·New Technology, Work and Employment
DOI 10.1111/ntwe.12112
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This article presents findings regarding collective organisation among online freelancers in middle‐income countries. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa, we find that the specific nature of the online freelancing labour process gives rise to a distinctive form of organisation, in which social media groups play a central role in structuring communication and unions are absent. Previous research is limited to either conventional freelancers or ‘microworkers’ who do relatively low‐skilled tasks via online labour platforms. This study uses 107 interviews and a survey of 658 freelancers who obtain work via a variety of online platforms to highlight that Internet‐based communities play a vital role in their work experiences. Internet‐based communities enable workers to support each other and share information. This, in turn, increases their security and protection. However, these communities are fragmented by nationality, occupation and platform.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/ntwe.12112

Cites

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 54

  1. 10.1177/0018726707075880 · DOI · Paper page
  2. Benson A. A.SojournerandA.Umyarov(2015) ‘Can Reputation Discipline the Gig Economy? Experimental Evidence From an Online Labor Market’ IZA Discussion Paper No. 9501 Institute of Labor Economics Bonn. · DOI
  3. 10.1111/ntwe.12038 · DOI · Paper page
  4. 10.1177/0038038511422725 · DOI
  5. 10.1111/1467-8543.00243 · DOI
  6. Cruz K., 2016, Fake Self‐Employment, Autonomy, and Regulating for Decent Work: Improving Working Conditions in the U.K. Stripping Industry, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 55, 1
  7. De Stefano V.(2016) The Rise of the “Just‐in‐Time Workforce”: On‐Demand Work Crowdwork and Labour Protection in the “Gig‐Economy”. Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 71 (Geneva:International Labour Organization). · DOI · Paper page
  8. 10.1177/2053951716679678 · DOI · Paper page
  9. 10.1111/irj.12190 · DOI
  10. Graham M., Digital Geographies
  11. Graham M., 2018, Towards a Fairer Platform Economy: Introducing the Fairwork Foundation, Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, 29, 242
  12. 10.1177/1024258916687250 · DOI · Paper page
  13. Graham M., 2017, The Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work at the Global Margins
  14. Gray M.L. S.Suri S.S.AliandD.Kulkarni(2016) ‘The Crowd is a Collaborative Network ’CSCW ‘16 Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer‐Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing Pages San Francisco CA USA February 27 — March 02 2016 (New York NY:ACM) pp. 134‐147. · DOI
  15. 10.1111/j.1468-2338.2011.00628.x · DOI
  16. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644414.001.0001 · DOI · Paper page
  17. Gupta N. D.Martin B.HanrahanandJ.O'Neill(2014) ‘Turk‐Life in India’ inProceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP'14) Sanibel Island 9–12 November. · DOI
  18. 10.1111/j.1468-2338.2004.00325.x · DOI
  19. 10.1093/cjres/rsp020 · DOI
  20. 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2004.tb00117.x · DOI
  21. Hitlin P., 2016, Research in the Crowdsourcing Age, a Case Study
  22. 10.1177/0950017014568142 · DOI
  23. 10.1111/bjir.12188 · DOI
  24. Huws U., 2016, Crowd Work in Europe Preliminary Results From a Survey in the U.K., Sweden, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands
  25. Hyman R., 1999, Globalization and Labour Relations, 94, 10.4337/9781035377732.00011 · DOI
  26. Hyman R., 2001, Understanding European Trade Unionism
  27. ILO, 2018, Trade Union Density Rate: Annual Data
  28. Irani L.andM.S.Silberman(2013) ‘Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk’ inProceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2013 ACM New York. · DOI · Paper page
  29. Kalleberg A.L., 2000, ‘Nonstandard Employment Relations: Part‐Time, Temporary and Contract Work’, Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 431
  30. Kalleberg A.L., 2016, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs in the Gig Economy, Perspectives on Work, 20, 10
  31. Kässi O.andV.Lehdonvirta(2016) ‘Online Labour Index: Measuring the Online Gig Economy for Policy and Research’ paper presented at Internet Politics & Policy 2016 22–23 September Oxford UK.https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/74943/1/MPRA_paper_74943.pdf
  32. 10.4324/9780203213940 · DOI · Paper page
  33. King M., 2014, New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement
  34. Kuek S.C., 2015, The Global Opportunity in Online Outsourcing, 10.1596/22284 · DOI · Paper page
  35. 10.1057/978-1-137-48087-3_4 · DOI
  36. Martin D. B.V.Hanrahan J.O'NeilandN.Gupta(2014) ‘Being a Turker’ inThe Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) Baltimore MD USA February 15 — 19 2014 (New York NY:ACM). · DOI · Paper page
  37. Marx K., 1976, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
  38. Marx K., 1967, The Communist Manifesto
  39. 10.1080/23736992.2016.1228813 · DOI
  40. 10.7551/mitpress/9780262017480.001.0001 · DOI · Paper page
  41. 10.1080/10350330500310111 · DOI · Paper page
  42. 10.1111/ntwe.12104 · DOI
  43. Rani U.(2017) Workshop on Development Implications of Digital Economies Workshop: Mapping and Issues 25th May Yogyakarta Indonesia.
  44. 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2006.00026.x · DOI
  45. 10.1111/j.1468-005X.2007.00192.x · DOI
  46. 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2011.00850.x · DOI
  47. 10.1017/CBO9780511615702 · DOI · Paper page
  48. Smith V., 1998, The Fractured World of the Temporary Worker: Power, Participation, and Fragmentation in the Contemporary Work‐ Place, Social Problems, 45, 411, 10.2307/3097205 · DOI
  49. Standing G., 2016, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
  50. 10.1177/0018726715596803 · DOI
  51. Vaughan D., 1992, What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry, 173
  52. Wood A.J. M.Graham V.LehdonvirtaandI.Hjorth(2016). ‘Virtual Production Networks: Fixing Commodification and Disembeddedness’. Presented at the Internet Policy & Politics Conference: Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford 22 September 2016. · DOI
  53. Wood A.J., Good gig, bad gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy, Work, Employment and Society
  54. Yin M. M.L.Gray S.SuriandJ.W.Vaughan(2016) ‘The Communication Network Within the Crowd’ Proceedings of the 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) 11 April. Montreal Canada. · DOI

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Wood, A. J., Lehdonvirta, V., & Graham, M.
Venue
New Technology, Work and Employment
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2018-07
Volume
33
Issue
2
Pages
95-112
ISSN
  • 0268-1072 (ISSN-L)
  • 1468-005X
DOI
10.1111/ntwe.12112
OpenAlex
W2857304043
Cited by
402
References
0
FWCI
88.85
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze
Licence
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor (vor, 9 d)
Funders
  • International Development Research Centre (107384‐001)
  • H2020 European Research Council (335716, 639652)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.