ABSTRACT The rise of gig work, enabled by algorithmic management, has reconfigured the traditional employer‐employee relationship, giving rise to new tensions in how Human Resource Management (HRM) is enacted and experienced. While existing scholarship acknowledges the relevance of HRM in this domain, little is known about how HRM intentions are operationalized through algorithmic management in gig work and how these efforts are perceived by gig workers. Therefore, using a case study approach, we aim to examine the disjuncture emerging of HRM implementation across intended, actual and perceived levels within gig work. Our findings demonstrate that these disjunctures' arise as structural outcomes of socio‐technical systems that mediate implementation. Building on this insight, the study makes three contributions. First, it advances the performance–control debate by demonstrating how algorithmic management redistributes and reconstitutes control across HRM levels. Second, it extends the rhetoric–reality debate by showing how algorithmic systems selectively translate and reshape HR rhetoric in practice. Third, it contributes to the literature on contemporary forms of bureaucratic control by illustrating how algorithmic infrastructures reconfigure the locus of HRM, embedding coordination and evaluation within platform architectures and situating HRM within pre‐structured systems of control.
Unions are increasingly adopting digital tools, yet research often portrays them as lagging in the digital age. This article challenges that view by examining union agency in the digitalisation of voting. Drawing on qualitative interviews with union officials, digital consultants collaborating on developing digital union voting and 12 years of voting and bargaining data from 6 Danish unions, we use affordance theory to show how union leaders' understanding of membership shapes which possibilities of digital voting systems they perceive and actualise, and which they leave dormant. We argue that digital voting is not merely a technical innovation but a political intervention that reshapes democratic practice, reconfigures union-member relations and redistributes power. Digitalisation enhances procedural democracy and creates openings for participation but also exposes tensions in how unions recognise membership diversity. We further argue that union members are not only participants in democratic procedures; their membership is constituted by these procedures.
Digital platform labour has been growing and meanwhile successfully established in many parts of the world. Yet participation in platform work not only varies markedly across countries but also by individual-level factors such as gender and parenthood. This paper explains variation in mothers' and fathers' participation in platform work by linking gender and parenthood to welfare regime settings. Using pooled COLLEEM survey data (2017-2018) for Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden and the UK, I estimate linear probability models of monthly platform work participation. Parenthood is associated with higher platform work participation in all five countries, but the increase is smallest in Germany and Sweden and largest in Spain, the UK, and moderately in Italy. Gender patterns vary by regime: mothers' participation is more responsive to parental-support institutions than fathers', while fathers' parenthood effects are especially pronounced in the UK and Spain. Overall, platform work seems to function as an adaptive strategy shaped by welfare regime settings and gendered care arrangements.
A pervasive discourse calls for worker upskilling amid ongoing digital transformation. This study introduces a skills-to-job mismatch perspective into research on the digital transformation of work by conceptualising technological adoption as a process that reshapes the relationship between workers' skill endowments and evolving job requirements. To empirically address this perspective, the study combines German individual- and establishment-level data with an entropy balancing method. The findings reveal that adopting new digital technologies in the workplace is associated with greater underskilling and reduced overskilling (i.e., skill underutilisation). Furthermore, effect heterogeneity emerges across the level of digitalisation in economic sectors. Technology adoption is more strongly associated with lower overskilling in less digitally mature sectors, while the positive association with underskilling is evenly distributed across sectors. Overall, this study provides a theoretically grounded framework and an informed empirical basis for a more nuanced debate on the digital transformation of work.
Digital labour groups (DLGs)-online groups focusing on labour issues-are emerging as new actors in employment relations. While existing research documents various aspects of DLGs' activities, there is limited understanding of their impact on industrial relations (IR) or how an impact is achieved. To address this, we drew on the synergy of mobilization theory, connective action and network analysis perspectives to review the literature on DLGs. We identified a framework consisting of three core factors-actions, dynamics and statics-shaping DLGs' potential to become impactful IR actors and three typical pathways through which DLGs impact IR: grassroots DLGs entering IR, grassroots DLGs influencing IR and IR entities leveraging DLGs. This reveals how specific configurations of the three factors influence the capacity of DLGs to have an institutional impact. The study enhances theoretical understanding of digital collectives, extends the applicability of traditional IR theories to new contexts and offers practical advice for stakeholders navigating a digitalizing world of work.
Through comparative research, we examine how disabled digital social entrepreneurs, Alex Dacy and Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, employ emotional engagement on Instagram to reshape perceptions of disability. Drawing on Ahmed's (2004) concept of affective economies, we analyse how affect is mobilised to foster audience engagement and cultivate digital communities. Through a visual narrative analysis of their top-performing 2023 Instagram posts, we identify three key strategies-sidelining, stacking, and subverting disability-each positioning disability differently through affective circulations that shape how digital social entrepreneurs engage their audiences while navigating platform affordances. We contribute to digital social entrepreneurship and disability studies by highlighting the role of affect in digital advocacy and illustrating how social media structures disability representation and engagement.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the nuclear and border control services had to reorganise their work, both on-site and remotely, to continue their activities. Whereas employees came to work at the power plants and border posts every day, the health rules introduced by the public authorities and those relating to the lockdown of populations suddenly meant that only a portion of the teams could be selected to continue activities essential to electricity production and food supply within the European Union. Above and beyond the perceived inequity between on-site workers and those able to work remotely, this research examines how the organisation regulates work arrangements, and in particular, how work activities are configured-that is, how they are carried out, and the autonomy and control involved in their execution. To this end, it draws on Jean-Daniel Reynaud's regulation theory to analyse the regulation of work organisations in these two sectors. It shows that the distinction between on-site and remote work was not set in stone, and that there was considerable movement (of workers, documents, procedures, etc.) between the two. It also highlights the changing dynamics of the reconfiguration of on-site and remote work, even over short periods of time, as a result of autonomous and control-based regulations designed to achieve these reorganisations. Our case studies concern the maintenance departments at two nuclear production sites plants in Spain, and the veterinary and phytosanitary inspection border services in three French ports. This comparison opens up analytical perspectives for many other sectors.
Research on the labour agency of remote-based online freelancers has often struggled to account for the interplay between platform dynamics, broader labour market conditions, and gendered household responsibilities. This article addresses this gap by proposing an integrated analytical framework that synthesises these dimensions to examine how freelancers exercise their labour agency in choosing between different online jobs-decisions which are vital to their platform success. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 Filipino freelancers, the findings show that freelancers exercise their agency by employing two overarching strategies: optimising their financial and temporal resources. These strategies are shaped by platform logics, as well as by constraints and opportunities linked to freelancers' wider labour market position and private-sphere responsibilities. The discussion demonstrates the framework's analytical value by illustrating how these strategies produce uneven implications for freelancers' longer-term platform trajectories, adding nuance to debates about the uneven gains of remote platform work.
This article addresses a blind spot in the debate on platform algorithmic management: what happens after disruption. While existing studies have documented how platform workers resist and contest algorithmic control, far less is known about how platforms stabilise and recalibrate control in everyday operations. We introduce the concept of patching to theorise these counteractions as socio-technical processes through which discontinuities in algorithmic management are identified, prioritised, and provisionally resolved. Drawing on a qualitative case study of food-delivery platforms in Chile, based on interviews with couriers, support staff, consumers, and other actors, we examine the role of internal support work in sustaining algorithmic control. Our findings show that patching relies on labour-intensive practices that translate disruptions into manageable problems while preserving the appearance of automated decision-making. By bringing support work into view, the article challenges technological determinism and binary platform-worker framings, and highlights the organisational labour through which algorithmic management is continuously produced, repaired, and normalised.
This article explores how neurodivergent workers use and make sense of assistive technologies by drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with these individuals. We contribute to the ability, motivation and opportunity (AMO) model by revealing its underlying neuro-normative assumptions. We show how assistive technologies, such as screen readers, influence the abilities and motivation of neurodivergent workers, making opportunities more attainable and allowing them to consider different career possibilities. We identify three processes through which assistive technologies influence the career development of neurodivergent workers. First, they can reduce cognitive, socioemotional and sensory challenges. Second, they can increase neurodivergent workers' feelings of confidence, autonomy, self-efficacy and agency. Third, they can remove the stigma associated with neurodivergence. Finally, we show that while assistive technologies enable neurodivergent workers to digitally conceal their condition, doing so can also have unintended negative consequences. We call this concept, consisting of hiding one's neurodivergence through assistive technologies, digital masking.
Disabled and/or neurodivergent people form 20% of the UK working population but their experience of remote working has been overlooked in research and practice. This research gave a voice to this community of workers to express their lived experience about how remote working can help to support their specific needs. Employing a qualitative design, we interviewed 24 disabled and/or neurodivergent remote workers across various UK organizations and sectors. Using Conservation of Resources theory, we identified (through thematic analysis) eight themes associated with conditional resources that, when configured in different combinations (referred to as resource 'caravans') can support the development and sustenance of personal resources to fulfil three key resource needs. These key resource needs involve being able to Control the Sensory Environment, Manage Conditions and Present Authentic Self-expressions. These needs emerged as specifically important for this group of workers and were likely to be fulfilled through remote and hybrid working arrangements. We encourage organizations to invest in these caravans of conditional resources, to enable flourishing in relation to the key needs of disabled and/or neurodivergent workers, and to promote sustainable, inclusive and fair remote working for all.
Digital monitoring represents a new dimension of external control. We focus on variation in the experiences and perceptions of digital monitoring among employees with differing access to resources due to their embeddedness in differentially resource-rich organizations and jobs. Based on German linked employer-employee survey data, our results suggest that employees in resource-rich organizations that are able and willing to pay relatively high wages to secure work performance are less likely to experience the use of automatically stored data on work steps for performance evaluation and to perceive digital monitoring as constant surveillance. The same is true of employees in resource-rich jobs with high task complexity. These patterns did not emerge for the mere automatic storage of data about work steps, which suggests that-in contrast to more invasive levels of digital monitoring-employees' experiences of this basic level are less likely structured by their embeddedness in organizational inequality regimes.
Platform-mediated work arises from networks of relationships between workers, platforms, and clients, representing complex relations between these actors. Knowledge of gig work has mostly emerged from studies of platform-worker interactions in transport and food delivery sectors, with little examination of the platform client perspective. With gig work now expanding to relational contexts like private care, it is important to understand the role of clients in shaping the experience and conditions of platform-mediated care work. This article explores platform clients' decision-making processes with a specific focus on choice of platform and, most importantly, engagement with platform workers. Employing ethics-of-care as a lens, the findings illustrate how the relational dimensions of solidarity, mutuality and attentiveness underpin platform clients' decisions. Clients seek to maintain a concern and care-for-self and also demonstrate care-for-others. This study demonstrates how platform clients' choices influence gig work relations and indeed shape conditions of care work in the gig economy.
