ABSTRACT Ridehailing platforms have been promoted across the Global South as vehicles for women's economic inclusion, yet little is known about how the women who take up this work come to be valued within it. This article examines how women ridehailing drivers in Sub‐Saharan Africa gain recognition when executing platform work in this postcolonial era of consciousness‐raising. The study aims to explain how, and by whom, recognition is performed and to identify the gendered, racialized, and classed forms of oppression from which these recognition practices emerge in order to theorize the relationship between recognition and oppression in postcolonial platform work. The research is based on a case study of women ridehailing drivers in Africa, drawing on netnography and interviews. We identify four recognition practices that represent a processual outcome that can emerge from oppression, and that are performed both by workers themselves and members of the wider platform ecosystem. The article contributes to scholarship on gender and platform work by moving beyond the exploitation–resistance binary, extends recognition theory to postcolonial digital labor, and broadens understanding of transformative, bottom‐up, community‐wide approaches for addressing platform work injustices.
ABSTRACT Highly educated refugee women often enter the local labor market without regaining their previous occupational standing. This study examines how Ukrainian refugee women rebuild occupational status after forced, gendered, and credentialed displacement. The analysis draws on 28 qualitative interviews, complemented by a pre‐interview survey, which provides descriptive context. We develop the concept of status reconstruction work to describe the practices through which women respond to the devaluation of qualifications, experience, and professional identity. Three interconnected forms of work emerged. Convertibility work makes prior competence usable in a new institutional setting. Connectivity work links that competence to information, opportunities, and gatekeepers. Credibility work rebuilds professional legitimacy and recognition. These forms are distinguished by their functions, so a single activity may serve multiple purposes. Gendered care and settlement demands limit the time and resources available for reconstruction work. At the same time, continued employment or study in Ukraine may preserve income and professional identity while simultaneously adding to women's workload. Experiences associated with post‐traumatic growth were uneven and did not necessarily accompany occupational reconstruction. By shifting attention from status loss to the work undertaken in response, the study links professional devaluation with women's agency. It shows how displaced women try to make prior competence usable, connect it to opportunities, and establish its credibility within recognition contexts they do not fully control.
ABSTRACT This study examines how female content creators on OnlyFans make sense of their bodies and sexualized labor within the broader context of platform‐based sexual economies. Taking Foucauldian theories of neoliberal subjectivation as its central theoretical framework, the study investigates how creators constitute themselves as autonomous and entrepreneurial subjects while managing and monetizing their sexualized bodies. The study is based on asynchronous written interviews conducted with 16 female OnlyFans content creators and analyzed through inductive content analysis. The findings are organized around four aggregate dimensions: commodification of the body and individual sovereignty, perceptions of gender roles, perceptions of exploitation and self‐exploitation, and sex work and identity. Although many participants framed their content production through the language of bodily autonomy, control, empowerment, and entrepreneurial self‐management, these accounts also revealed how market logic and gendered structures shape the ways sexualized bodies are understood, displayed, and monetized. In this context, the article proposes the concept of self‐sexism to describe the active, voluntary, and economically incentivized reproduction of objectifying norms through one's own embodied and digital labor. The study thereby advances existing accounts of the neoliberal subject by showing how conscious agency can become a mechanism through which gendered objectification is actively reproduced and converted into economic value.
ABSTRACT This article examines psychosocial harm at work as a sociological problem of inequality rather than only an issue of individual stress. Drawing on Acker's concept of inequality regimes together with minority stress and intersectionality, and based on 60 in‐depth interviews with workers in Portugal, it analyses how overload, insecurity, work‐family conflict, poor leadership, and weak reporting systems are organized through gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and migration‐related relations of power. Reflexive thematic analysis developed three themes: the organization of harm through workload, insecurity, and leadership; recognition, legitimacy, and the cost of difference; and conditional belonging through redress, informal networks, and compounded exclusion. Across these themes, diversity initiatives organized around single categories left a structural gap for workers marginalized on several dimensions at once. Psychosocial harm was not evenly distributed but produced through labor‐process intensification, unequal legitimacy, conditional belonging, and the individualization of coping. Diversity and well‐being initiatives offered limited protection when unsupported by workload regulation, accountable management, and credible mechanisms of redress. The article contributes to sociology of work debates through an integrative framework that links inequality regimes and minority stress as complementary levels of a single account of psychosocial harm, showing how the proximal mechanisms of minority stress operate through the organisational arrangements that inequality regimes analysis identifies, and how recovery, credibility, and redress come to be distributed unequally through those arrangements across workers' intersecting positions. Workplace well‐being, on this account, requires structural reforms designed around workers' unequal and intersectional exposure to risk.
ABSTRACT Masculinity is often portrayed as a barrier to shifting away from fossil fuels because jobs in extractive industries represent a nostalgic masculine breadwinner identity. Accordingly, proposals for a just energy transition have provoked backlash aimed at protecting against perceived threats to manhood. Yet even though many men in blue‐collar jobs work with green technologies, their roles and perspectives are often overlooked in gender and environmental scholarship. Likewise, little is known about the occupational health and safety risks they face in these roles. We introduce the term teal‐collar job to describe the combination of blue‐collar and green‐collar work. We find that teal‐collar workers are embracing a shifting workplace culture characterized by respect for health and safety, camaraderie, and a desire to be emotionally present for family. However, enthusiastic environmentalism is not a prominent feature within participants' expressions of masculinity. Thus, our study challenges assumptions that working in blue‐collar trades broadly reproduces hegemonic, domineering forms of masculinity.
