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

2018· article· en· 396 citations· W2857304043 on OpenAlex· 10.1111/ntwe.12112

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A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian funderA Canadian agency funded it. The work may carry no Canadian affiliation at all.

No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

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.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.240
Teacher spread
0.229 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
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

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.

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.

The record

Venue
New Technology Work and Employment
Topic
Digital Economy and Work Transformation
Field
Social Sciences
Canadian institutions
Funders
H2020 European Research CouncilEconomic and Social Research CouncilInternational Development Research Centre
Keywords
The InternetGig economyWork (physics)NationalityVariety (cybernetics)BusinessStructuringSocial mediaImmigrationPolitical scienceEngineeringWorld Wide Web
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes