Hi tutor, i would like to seek help on how to devise
1) Introduction part (300w-500w)
2) Conclusions (500w-1000w)
3) This is my first Literature review for the module Contemporary Issues in Business (NX0328)
4) The research question was how gig economy changed traditional employment, i would like to link it with labour process theory
5) Please feel free to provide me any info in regards to my research preferably with citation.
6) Please feel free to provide me the structure of my literature review in a more logical sense
7) How significant is my research in Singapore context
How has the emergence of the gig economy changed the traditional employment landscape for businesses in the 21st century?
Labour process theory
In the book (Knights & Willmott, 2016), the author examines the theoretical foundations of labour process analysis and its impact in the fields of industrial sociology, organization theory, industrial relations, labour economics, politics and business studies since the publication of “Labour and Monopoly Capital” by Braverman. The labor process theory investigates how individuals work, who controls their work, what skills they employ at work, and how they are compensated for their efforts.
In 1974, Harry Braverman wrote Labor and Monopoly Capitalism(Elwell, n.d.), an examination of the effects of capitalism on work in the United States during the 20th century. Since the turn of the century, the proportion of the labor force engaged in essentially routine manual professions has increased every decade. An allegedly technologically and academically sophisticated capitalist society appears to be founded on the exploitation of a substantial percentage of its working population.
Braverman believed that businesses utilize automation to replace or simplify skilled activities to the point where they can be carried out by unskilled individuals. He said that management deploys technology to increase control over the work process and the workforce. As he explained in the opening pages of Labor and Monopoly Capital:
“The more I read in the formal and informal literature of occupations, the more I became aware of a contradiction that marks much of the current writing inthis area. On the one hand, it is emphasized that modern work, as a result of the scientific-technical revolution and “automation,” requires ever higher levels of education, training, the greater exercise of intelligence and mental effort in general. At the same time, a mounting dissatisfaction with the conditions of industrial and office labor appears to contradict this view. For it is also said- sometimes by the same people who at other times support the first view- that work has become increasingly subdivided into petty operations that fail to sustain the interest or engage the capacities of humans with current levels of education; that these petty operations demand ever less skill and training; and that the modern trend of work by its “mindlessness” and “bureaucratization” is “alienating” ever larger sections of the working population.” (Braverman, 1998, p. xiii)
Although the original focus of labor process theory was on manufacturing employees, it has since been expanded to include employees in the service sector and lower levels of the public sector. (Colley, 2011) contends that in the public sector labor process, executives maintained a strategic position, and that government reforms were intended to lessen their positional strength. This analysis reveals that Executives may have had greater influence over practical components of work but less authority over the more strategic and intellectual elements of work, despite what the New Public Management (NPM) literature claims about the reforms giving public managers more autonomy and control over decisions.
Moreover,(Gaines et al., 1996) indicate that labor process theory offers an alternate method of thinking and writing about employee rights by shedding light on the dominant and oppressive features of rights. The author presents a conceptual framework of LPT based on contemporary works, suggests strategies to integrate employee rights and LPT, and identifies potential benefits of viewing employee rights through the lens of LPT. In a capitalist political economy, labor process theory reveals the basic misalignment between the interests of employers and employees. The social relations of production, the managerial control imperative, and the reorganization of work are employed to illustrate how organizations retain their hegemonic status. This article provides the foundation for an alternative paradigmatic perspective of the employment relationship and enlightens our understanding of how employee rights are frequently impacted and moderated by work organizations.
However, Burroway’s research shows that workers under monopoly capitalism actively participate in their own exploitation as a result of shifts in the nature of the work itself (Burawoy, 1982). Changes in the factory have occurred on many fronts, including the technical, political, and ideological. These alterations are associated with post-World War II adjustments in industrial relations and the plant’s market position:
“The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers determines the relationship of rulers to ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of theproduction relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the means of production to the direct producers-a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity-which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of state.”(Burawoy, 1982, p. 16)
Similarly, (Warhurst, 1998) examines the structure and control of the communal socialist Israeli kibbutz labor process using ethnographic case study information from 51 participants. It discovers that workers do determine the organization and control of its industrial labor process, which provides an opportunity for a theoretical re-evaluation of socialism as well as a broader appreciation for the empirical possibilities in the organization and control of the labor process in general. The Israeli kibbutz movement continues to be a legitimate attempt to provide a socialist labor process devoid of administrative control, worker subjugation, and exploitation.
(Adler, 2007) notes in his study that the proportion of US 17-year-olds who had completed high school increased from 6% in 1900 to 57% in 1950, and to over 80% by the end of the century. Over 85% of employees made at least one suggestion every year, and each employee made more than three suggestions on average:
“The great thing about standardized work is that if everyone is doing the job the same way, and we run into a problem, say a quality problem, we can easily identify where it’s coming from and fix it. If everyone is doing the job however they feel like, you can’t even begin any serious problem-solving.” (Adler, 2007, p. 1334)
Despite this significant rise in the availability of highly educated labor, high school and college education have continued to produce a considerable positive economic return in the labor market. Labor process theory was at the heart of critical management research. He claims that one of the reasons for LPT’s decline has been its failure to deal with two unsettling oddities.
How has labour process theory been used to analyze work in the digital age?
Briken and Thompson’s new book (Briken et al., 2017) critically examines some of the big-picture narratives surrounding the digitalization of work and employment relations, as well as how digital technologies effect work and organizations. It offers a thorough examination of technological, organizational, and labor-related changes not just in emerging “digital” businesses, but also in “traditional” service and manufacturing sectors. The digital workplace is leading a “paradigm shift” in the nature of work. Control regimes, skill trajectories, power relations, job intensification, substitution, technology’s involvement in the labor process, and cost-cutting techniques are all explored and challenged.
The Labour Process Theory framework is important for understanding the changes in work and organizations brought about by digital technologies. Digital technologies are opening up new opportunities for employees while also posing new obstacles for organizations.As several studies conducted over the years have demonstrated, there is always room for flexibility in how technologies might be implemented in various business and workplace settings. (Alasoini et al., n.d.)This qualitative study conducted in two Finnish enterprises with 14 participants, including six drivers, six supervisors, and two middle managers, explores the notion that digitization is leading to a considerable replacement of the work of heavy road vehicle drivers. The study finds no support for the idea that labor substitution would occur in the near future, but rather indicators of a developing digital barrier between drivers and supervisors, leaving drivers as spectators in digitalization-related learning processes.
(Ragnedda & Muschert, 2013)Unequal access to digital devices including laptops, cellphones, tablets, and the internet is known as the “digital divide.” The access to resources and information is divided and unfairly distributed as a result of the digital divide. People without access to the Internet and other ICTs are at a socioeconomic disadvantage in the Information Age, as ICTs have surpassed manufacturing technologies as the foundation for global economies and social interaction.
Furthermore, review paper by (Branca et al., 2020) on the digitization of the European iron and steel industry, published in Strasbourg and funded by the European Union’s Erasmus Plus program, describes the current technological change of the industry. The objective of TrackOpt is to build an automatic ladle tracking system. In order to adopt Predictive Maintenance approaches, equipment monitoring and intelligent decision-making processes must be utilized. Knowledge Management is essential to attaining digitalization process enhancements. Since 2013, nearly 1.5 million net new employment have been generated in Europe’s industrial sectors, and worker productivity has increased by 2.7% annually on average since 2009. The steel industry should be able to accomplish zero waste, zero emissions from climate change, and half of its existing resources. Digital technologies are utilized to enhance the process’s adaptability and dependability as well as the product’s quality.
Gig economy
In his book The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. The author described gig economy with following five characteristics:
“1. Largely market-based: the sharing economy creates markets that enable the exchange of goods and the emergence of new services, resulting in potentially higher levels of economic activity.
2. High-impact capital: the sharing economy opens new opportunities for everything, from assets and skills to time and money, to be used at levels closer to their full capacity.
3. Crowd-based “networks” rather than centralized institutions or “hierarchies”: the supply of capital and labor comes from decentralized crowds of individuals rather than corporate or state aggregates; future exchange may be mediated by distributed crowd-based marketplaces rather than by centralized third parties.
4. Blurring lines between the personal and the professional: the supply of labor and services often commercializes and scales peer-to-peer activities like giving someone a ride or lending someone money, activities which used to be considered “personal.”
5. Blurring lines between fully employed and casual labor, between independent and dependent employment, between work and leisure: many traditionally full-time jobs are supplanted by contract work that features a continuum of levels of time commitment, granularity, economic dependence, and entrepreneurship.”(Sundararajan, 2017, p. 27)
“The gig economy is the collection of markets that match providers to consumers on a gig basis in support of on-demand commerce.” (Donovan et al., 2016, p. 1)
The gig economy is the collection of markets that provide on-demand commerce by matching providers with consumers on a gig basis. On-demand businesses consider providers as independent contractors that use their platforms to earn referrals and conduct business with clients. Congress continues to focus on the availability of benefits and safeguards for independent contractors in the gig economy. Recent trends in on-demand commerce indicate that gig workers may constitute an expanding portion of the U.S. labor market. Insofar as gig economy workers are seen as independent contractors, gig jobs differ significantly from traditional employment.
The expansion of digital platform labor has significantly altered the employment landscape of the modern era, particularly the employment practices of businesses.
According to (Stanford, 2017), platform-based firms rely mostly on on-demand contingent labor to conduct the productive work involved with providing the service. They have demonstrated that the key labor practices employed by digital platforms represent a return to work organization tactics prevalent throughout earlier stages of capitalism. Digital platform work patterns are neither “new” nor driven completely or even mostly by “technology.” Core to the economic concepts of these platforms are new digital tools for planning, allocation, management, and payment.
Using labor process theory,(Chai & Scully, 2019) investigates labor in the sharing economy. The sharing economy can benefit from the application of LPT ideas like concealing and safeguarding excess value, technology as control, owners and managers’ invisibility, and possessive individualism. It uses Uber as a case study to apply ideas from the theory. The study makes the case that we can highlight uneven exchange and distributive fairness by taking into account labor, capital, and the power relations between them.
The particular qualities of this workforce, however, make systematic sampling of representative populations challenging. (P. Stewart et al., 2020) addresses collectivism’s persistence in the gig economy. The author uses qualitative interviews with 14 male food delivery couriers aged 20-36 in Europe, funded by the European Union’s1/7 Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development, and Demonstration, to investigate the various narratives surrounding gig work, including platform work as leisure, as economic opportunity, and as collectivist labor discovered that while the gig economy offers workers autonomy and flexibility, collectivism still persists in the gig economy.
Similarly, (Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020) examines the chances and barriers for solidarity among gig workers by analyzing two case studies of male gig economy couriers in Italy and the UK. It investigated the causes of conflict in the app-mediated form of work organization and the factors that helped and hindered the development of active solidarity and collective action among gig workers using the framework of labor process theory.
Even in harsh work environments, there are many different ways for gig workers to band together. The rise and fall of the standard employment relationship is explained by the changing environment in which private employers try to get people to work for them. While, the workers are referred to as “service providers,” a category for the exchange of labor in the service economy. The platform, sometimes known as a “two-sided platform,” is the technological tool that links customers and service providers.
A survey conducted by Pew Research Center stated 16% of Americans have ever earned money on online gig platforms indicating the rise of digital “gig platforms”.
Paid work linked with digital platform firms (in taxi, delivery, and other tasks) is characterized by characteristics that impede the application of conventional labor legislation and employment norms. This paper (A. Stewart & Stanford, 2017) covers the challenges of regulating employment in the gig economy as well as the five most prominent alternatives for doing so. These alternatives include enforcement of current laws, clarification or expansion of definitions of ’employment,’ creation of a new category of ‘independent worker,’ creation of rights for ‘workers,’ not employees, and reconsideration of the concept of a ’employer’. The Productivity Commission has discussed the advantages of gig work. It has warned of the possibility of a “significant change in work relations.” According to research, the amount of workers engaged in stereotypical gig platform jobs is less than 1% of the labor force. The expansion of the gig economy poses significant difficulties to existing ways of regulating employment and establishing basic standards. The triangle relationship between the worker who produces or performs the service and the digital middleman that enables the entire process is a significant component of gig employment that complicates the mission of labor regulation.
In the world of irregular digitally mediated work, there is much doubt about the extent of traditional norms, minimum requirements, and remedies. Regulators and legislators should think about how to improve and expand the regulatory framework that governs gig work.
In a case study of discussions between a platform business (Airtasker) and a peak trade unions body (Unions New South Wales) to set basic standards, minimum standards were negotiated and agreed upon.
(Minter, 2017) examines the need for new tools to protect and improve minimal standards for digital platform workers. It explains that labor law and institutions must adapt to the new reality of work and develop new tools to safeguard and improve minimum standards for workers in digital platform enterprises. Contracts for digital platform labour in the so-called “gig economy” are individual rather than collective and irregular. Digital platform businesses operate in a variety of economic sectors, although the work they allow is typically focused in less skilled labor segments. Airtasker has taken significant measures in its agreement with Unions NSW to acknowledge the potential risks of gig-economy business models for the workers who conduct the real labor.
In a systematic literature review by (Wardhana et al., 2020) there are 46 identified articles that address regulatory problems related to the gig economy. Since 2016, the gig economy has been a new phenomena, particularly in terms of legislation. The increase in publications for 2017 is due to studies evaluating the legislation of Europe. Globally, operating licenses have become an important issue. Despite probable flaws, the research has a number of constraints, including restricted access to a limited number of databases and studies and the predominance of western nations in the broad studies utilized for the SLR.
The gig economy has generated ambiguity over the employment status of workers, hence facilitating the erosion of traditional labor rules. The agreement allows for the establishment of basic safeguards regarding recommended pay rates, safety, insurance, and dispute resolution. However, regulatory difficulties pertaining to the gig economy may be applied differently in developing nations compared to Asia, Africa, and South America.
To better understand the incentives of on-demand employees, a group of researchers created an econometric model. (Allon et al., n.d.) discovered that, in contrast to traditional employees who work on a set schedule, gig economy workers are free to choose their own schedule and platform to give service, and that an hourly salary has a beneficial impact on both the decision to work and the duration of the labor.
This demonstrates that Gig economy enterprises profit from labor flexibility by recruiting independent self-scheduling workers, posing a significant issue for governments concerned with protecting gig workers.
(Gandini, 2019)discusses the concepts of ‘point of production,’ emotional labor, and control in the gig economy using labor process theory. He contends that labor process theory provides a unique set of instruments for expanding our knowledge of how labor power becomes a commodity in an environment where the encounter between supply and demand for work is mediated by a digital platform. Gandini uses labour process theory to argue that the gig economy relies on emotional labour and feedback systems to control workers.
Feedback, ranking, and rating systems are used to manage and monitor workers in the gig economy; nevertheless, this method generates a broader range of issues for future study to address, leading to more questions than answers.
Moreover,(Fuchs & Sevignani, n.d.) contends that digital labor is a type of alienated labor by using Labour process theory to investigate Facebook as a case study to illustrate how work in the digital age has been transformed by digital technologies and discusses the distinction between digital labor and digital work. Meanwhile,(Warhurst et al., 2008) contends that by examining the material conditions of service employment, labor process theory can be applied to evaluate work in the digital age. Understand the nature of service work, as it is a sort of labor that is characterized by a combination of physical and mental activity, as service work is frequently devalued and underpaid.
How has the emergence of the gig economy changed the traditional employment landscape for businesses in the 21st century?
(Burtch et al., n.d.) discovered that the introduction of gig-economy platforms into local areas diminishes entrepreneurial activity, as measured by the number of Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign starts. Using data from Kickstarter and the US Census, the examination of the impact of the gig economy on local entrepreneurial activity suggests that the gig economy has altered the traditional employment landscape for businesses by reducing entrepreneurial activity by providing viable employment opportunities for the unemployed and under-employed.
However, (Abraham et al., 2019) discovered evidence of significant and quickly rising gig activity only in the transportation services industry, which is only a small portion of the economic environment. The recent overall surge in self-employment seen in administrative and private sector transaction statistics is not reflected in core household surveys.
Additionally, (Graham et al., 2017) discovered that while there are important and tangible benefits for a range of workers, there are also a range of risks and costs that adversely affect the livelihoods of digital workers in his multi-year study with 152 digital workers and digital work stakeholders recruited through different digital labor markets/platforms in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia funded by the World Bank and the Rockefeller foundation. Certification systems, organizing digital employees, regulatory strategies, and democratic management of online labor platforms could all improve digital workers’ working conditions and livelihoods.
What are the implications of digital technology for the future of work in developing economies?
According to (Raja & Christiaensen, 2017), digital technologies will primarily benefit poor countries through transforming the world of work by increasing labor productivity and cutting transaction costs. He also explores how technology is changing the types of talents that companies require and how these risks generating disruption, as well as how the evolution of the world of work offers a threat to individuals who are too slow or unable to shift.
Meanwhile (Schlogl, n.d.) argues digital technology may increase inequality in the world. The author discusses the future of work in developing nations in the light of the digital divide in his paper. The author contends that the digital divide may worsen the worldwide technical difference. Only about 5% of the goods made in Sub-Saharan Africa were exported as high-tech goods, compared to about 20% from upper-middle-income and high-income economies. Even the same jobs are more routine in developing countries because they use less capital. The COVID-19 crisis is making the trend toward robotization and digitization move even faster. About half of the world’s people now use the Internet, which is up from less than 7% at the turn of the century. The number of people who use the Internet is lower in Africa, ranging from less than 10% in Central Africa to around 50% in South and North Africa.
Additionally, (Schlogl, n.d.) analyzes how industrial activities in the African economy are evolving as a result of digital technologies. Digital technology, such as the ability to gather and interpret “big data,” automation and robotics, and new digitally driven production procedures, are progressively being incorporated into industrial activities. The workflow, supply chains, and distribution channels of factories are likewise undergoing data-driven changes. Crowdsourcing for industrial innovation and other expanded kinds of cooperation and collaboration are becoming increasingly popular.
Further,(Rani & Furrer, 2021) examines how digital technology have spawned new forms of flexible labor. This research demonstrates the ongoing trend of crowdsourcing low-skilled work to crowd workers in developing countries using online microtask platforms. The findings of this research reveal that several platform design characteristics, combined with algorithmic management, have rendered workers’ working conditions more precarious. The design elements deny workers any control or autonomy over their job process, working hours, and so on.
The digital platform economy model is gaining popularity worldwide because it reduces transaction costs, boosts productivity, and employs workers from a global labor pool. Companies are increasingly finding that outsourcing work to the crowd via online platforms is more efficient than doing it in-house. Due to biased rejections and non-payments, the evidence implies that worker compensation in developing nations is low. The implications of digital technology for the future of employment in developing nations include the possibility for higher labor productivity, decreased transaction costs, and lowered market entry barriers.
