The resurgence of gig work: Historical and theoretical perspectives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Digital platform businesses primarily utilise on-call contingent workers, using their own tools and equipment, to perform the productive work associated with the supplied service. The expansion of this business model has led some to proclaim that traditional ‘jobs’ will come to an end. Some welcome this development, others fear its consequences for the stability and quality of work – but most see it as driven primarily by technology, and therefore largely ‘inevitable’. This article provides historical and theoretical perspective on the expansion of digitally mediated work, to better understand the range of forces (technological, economic and socio-political) at work. It shows that the major features of platform work were all visible in earlier periods of capitalism, but they became less prominent with the rise of the ‘standard employment relationship’ in the 20th century. The rise and fall of the standard employment relationship is described with reference to the changing context for the labour extraction effort of private employers. A better understanding of the complete range of forces driving changes in work organisation, and a rejection of the assumption that they are technologically determined and hence inevitable, can inform regulatory and political responses to the rise of platform work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it