An exploratory study into knowledge workers' experiences of ‘bad fulfilling jobs’ in the platform economy

The seminar presentation will focus on her first findings chapter exploring how platform workers make sense of ‘bad fulfilling jobs’ (Knox et al, 2015) through the lenses of job quality and ‘hope labour.’ An overview of her thesis and the main focus of the presentation can be found below.

Surprisingly, despite poor objective job quality indicators (low pay, limited training, employment insecurity, weak social protection) associated with platform-mediated work, an increasing number of studies indicate that platform workers tend to report relatively high levels of job satisfaction and enjoyment of this type of work (Broughton et al, 2019; Bucher et al, 2021; Dunn, 2020; Goods et al, 2019; Panteli et al, 2020; Myhill et al, 2021). This study contributes to the literature on platform work by shedding light on this paradox through the conceptual lenses of ‘hope labour’ understood as ‘unpaid or under-compensated labour undertaken in the present, usually for exposure or experience’ (Mackenzie and McKinlay, 2020, p. 1). In doing so, this qualitative exploratory study reveals why certain key dimensions of job quality (indicative of objective poor quality) are deprioritised and to some extent subjectively experienced as positive depending on respondents’ life/career stage and personal circumstances.

Furthermore, this research explores how translators succeed in getting jobs on platforms and in particular, how they accumulate social capital in order to advance their careers. Social capital is understood as resources which can be accessed by virtue of membership to a particular group (Portes, 1998) and is hence based on ‘social relations – in which favours and gifts are exchanged’ (Adler and Kwon, 2002, p.18). While the centrality of social capital to the functioning of freelance labour markets is well-established in the literature (Antcliff et al, 2007; Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012; Butler and Russell, 2018), the extent to which it is applicable to online labour markets represents an under-explored area of inquiry (Gandini, 2016; Blyth et al, 2022). Exploring how platform workers accumulate and potentially draw on social capital in order to secure (regular) work and increase career mobility opportunities provides a window into the nature of social relations underpinning this type of work, and in so doing, it captures how individuals navigate careers in the platform economy.