PODCAST: Platforms and Shared Economy: Precarity of Work or Building Agency?
The author of this article is Jeemol Unni, Professor of Economics, Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India
The full article is available at Indian Journal of Labour Economics. Volume 66, Issue No. 2, Pages 355–370 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-023-00435-8
Abstract
The emergence of platforms and the associated idea of the shared economy have
fostered a lot of research relating to the future of work. The question that arises is:
does the advent of platform work enhance precarity of work as contracts become
increasingly informal or does it build agency as the barriers to work participation
decline? It is critical to understand the nuances of the ongoing processes and recognize
the heterogeneity among platforms as precarity of work or agency may be a
function of the nature of the platform and the type of work that it offers. This paper
presents a tentative heuristic framework that can be used to understand precarity and
agency in the context of the platform economy. This framework and some empirical
evidence is used to compare two types of platforms in the food sector to understand
the nuances of the processes at work.
Keywords Platform economy · Shared economy · Gender · Empowerment ·
Precarity · Agency
Unni-Verse 