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This work examines the intersection between traditional human resource management and the novel employment arrangements of the expanding gig economy. While there is a substantial multidisciplinary literature on the digital platform labor phenomenon, it has been largely centered on the experiences of gig workers. As digital labor platforms continue to grow and specialize, more managers, executives, and human resource practitioners will need to make decisions about whether and how to utilize gig workers. Here the authors explore and interrogate the unique features of human resource management (HRM) activities in the context of digital labor platforms. The authors discuss challenges and opportunities regarding (1) HRM in organizations that outsource labor needs to external labor platforms, (2) HRM functions within digital labor platform firms, and (3) HRM policies and practices for organizations that develop their own spin-off digital labor platform. To foster a more nuanced understanding of work in the gig economy, the authors identify common themes across these contexts, highlight knowledge gaps, offer recommendations for future research, and outline pathways for collecting empirical data on HRM in the gig economy.

This chapter will introduce the concept of the gig economy. It begins with a brief discussion of technological changes and their impact on the workforce and labour market, demonstrating how the trend shifts towards the gig economy. It then examines the trends that are influencing this transformation and discusses various perspectives and the attractiveness of the gig economy for workers and businesses. This chapter will also discuss the gig economy, platform economy, digital platform, and gig worker categories. It concludes with a brief discussion of some of the opportunities, issues, and challenges associated with the gig economy.

Career management research and literature has been slow to respond to the rise of the gig economy. Perhaps in part due to the temporal, flexible and shifting nature of the gig economy, there could be an assumption that the boundaryless and protean career management models that have dominated careers thinking for nearly 30 years retain and extend their applicability. However, whilst there is clear resonance with discourses such as boundaryless, portfolio and protean careers within the gig economy, this chapter will argue these models cannot adequately address female career management experiences. Through a feminist poststructuralist and intersectional lens, the concept of the frayed career is advocated as a more useful approach for understanding the impact of gender and intersecting subject positions on career management experiences. With growing numbers of women employed in the gig economy and in addressing calls for a greater focus on gender and intersecting identities on the experiences of gig work, this chapter analyses the role of gender, ethnicity and class and career management outcomes in the gig economy amongst Human Resources professionals. The frayed career concept is used to demonstrate how gig work can be incorporated into the rhythmicity of a career and how shifting intersectional positions can reveal alternative discourses of privilege and precarity from the otherwise assumed position of multiple disadvantage. In doing so there is an opportunity to reflect on appropriate career management guidance for women in the gig economy beyond the dichotomous positions of privilege or disadvantage and career solutions based on Westernised linear career ideals.

Despite widespread interest in the gig economy, academic research on the topic has lagged behind. The present chapter applies organizational theory and research to compose a working model for understanding participation in the gig economy and how gig work may impact worker health and well-being. Drawing from past research this chapter defines the gig economy in all its diversity and advances a framework for understanding why individuals enter into gig economy. Next, the authors discuss how various characteristics of the gig economy and gig workers can be understood as both demands and resources that influence how gig work is likely to be experienced by the individual. To understand how these characteristics are likely to influence worker health and well-being, we draw from past research on alternative work arrangements and entrepreneurship, as well as the limited extant research on the gig economy. Finally, a research agenda is proposed to spur much needed research on the gig economy and its workers.

A growing body of research finds that gig economy platforms use gamification to enhance managerial control. Focusing on technologically mediated forms of gamification, this literature reveals how platforms mobilize gig workers’ work effort by making the labour process resemble a game. This chapter contends that this tech-centric scholarship fails to fully capture the historical continuities between contemporary and much older occurrences of game-playing at work. Informed by interviews and participatory observations at two food delivery platforms in Amsterdam, I document how these platforms’ piece wage system gives rise to a workplace dynamic in which severely underpaid delivery couriers continuously employ game strategies to maximize their gig income. Reminiscent of observations from the early shop floor ethnographies of the manufacturing industry, I show that the game of gig income maximization operates as an indirect modality of control by (re)aligning the interests of couriers with the interests of capital and by individualizing and depoliticizing couriers’ overall low wage level. I argue that the new, algorithmic technologies expand and intensify the much older forms of gamified control by infusing the organizational activities of shift and task allocation with the logic of the piece wage game and by increasing the possibilities for interaction, direct feedback and immersion. My study contributes to the literature on gamification in the gig economy by interweaving it with the classic observations derived from the manufacturing industry and by developing a conceptualization of gamification in which both capital and labour exercise agency.

To manage workers in the gig economy, we must understand the various types of gig workers and how they perform. This chapter focuses on the many types of gig workers and how professional gig workers overlap with knowledge workers in the knowledge economy. The chapter will next go through the distinctions between the gig economy and the talent economy. This chapter will finish by examining the informal economy and its relationship to the gig economy.