Widjaya Ivan/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In the platform economy, digital technologies enable a wide range of interactions. You’re probably familiar with sharing economy platforms such as Uber and Airbnb. But probably lesser known are the transformative effects that online labour platforms have on contemporary organisations and how work gets done.
As an organisation studies scholar, my work furthers understanding of the adoption of online labour platforms by organisations and the new organisational forms, processes, and practices that are developed to get work done with external people. In the first part of this two-part article, I will discuss what kinds of platforms are out there and how organisations are adopting them. In Part Two (to be published on 25 April), I will outline an organisational perspective on online freelancing platforms, to better assess how the future of work is taking shape.
