Description
This edited collection examines the gig economy in the age of convergence from a critical political economic perspective. Contributions explore how media, technology, and labor are converging to create new modes of production, as well as new modes of resistance.
From rideshare drivers in Los Angeles to domestic workers in Delhi, from sex work to podcasting, this book draws together research that examines the gig economy's exploitation of workers and their resistance. Employing critical theoretical perspectives and methodologies in a variety of national contexts, contributors consider the roles that media, policy, culture, and history, as well as gender, race, and ethnicity play in forging working conditions in the 'gig economy'. Contributors examine the complex and historical relationships between media and gig work integral to capitalism with the aim of exposing and, ultimately, ending exploitation.
This book will appeal to students and scholars examining questions of technology, media, and labor across media and communication studies, information studies, and labor studies as well as activists, journalists, and policymakers.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: The Gig Economy: Workers and Media in the Age of Convergence
- History: We Were Always Gig Workers
- Ideology: Thinking Like a Gig Economist
- Media: Negotiating the Gig Economy
- Struggles: Organizing in the Gig Economy
- Conclusion: We Are All Gig Workers
Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Todd Wolfson, Brian Dolber, Chenjerai Kumanyika
Chapter 1 Behind the Wheel and in the Streets: Technological Transformation, Exit, and Voice in the New York City Taxi Industry
Hannah Johnston, Queen’s University
Chapter 2 More than a Gig?: Ridehailing in Los Angeles County
Tia Koonse, Lucero Herrera, Saba Waheed, Janna Shadduck-Hernández, Ana Luz Gonzalez-Vasquez and Kean Flowers
University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Labor Research and Education
Chapter 3 Care in the Platform Economy: Interrogating the Digital Organisation of Domestic Work in India
Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi, Centre for Internet and Society
Chapter 4 Sex Work/Gig Work: A Feminist Analysis of Precarious Domina Labor in the Gig Economy
Lauren Levitt, University of Southern California
Chapter 5 "The Future Demands we All become Prolific Artists": Cultural Ideals of Gig Work in Popular Management Literature
Juhana Venäläinen, University of Eastern Finland
Chapter 6. "Uber for Radio?" Professionalism and Production Cultures in Podcasting
John L. Sullivan, Muhlenberg College
Chapter 7. Good People "Belong Anywhere": Airbnb’s Emerging Neofascism
Brian Dolber, California State University San Marcos and Christina Ceisel, California State University, Fullerton
Chapter 8 "Uber" University and Labor Recomposition: Notes on (Dis)Organized Academia
Marco Briziarelli and Susana Martínez Guillem, University of New Mexico
Chapter 9 "Viene cuando viene, no es gran cantidad de dinero": Opacity, Precarity, and the Unwaged Labor of Latina Audiobook Narrators
Ruth L. Nuñez, University of California, Los Angeles
Chapter 10. Liquid Assets: Camming and Cashing in on Desire in the Digital Age
Kavita Ilona Nayar, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Chapter 11. This is Gig Leisure: Games, Gamification, and Gig Labor Randy Nichols, University of Washington-Tacoma
Chapter 12: Platform Organizing: Tech Worker Struggles and Digital Tools for Labor Movements
Enda Brophy and Seamus Grayer, Simon Fraser University
Chapter 13. Competition, Collaboration and Combination: Differences in Attitudes to
Collective Organization Among Offline and Online Platform Workers
Kaire Holts, Tallinn University of Technology, Ursula Huws, Neil Spencer and Matthew Coates, University of Hertfordshire
Chapter 14 Uprooting Uber: From "Data Fracking" to Data Commons
Stephen E. Rahko and Byron B. Craig, Indiana University- Bloomington
Chapter 15. Precarity Beyond the Gig: From University Halls to Tech Campuses
Tamara Kneese, University of San Francisco
Chapter 16. The Cycle of Struggle: Food Platform Strikes in the UK 2016-18
Callum Cant, University of West London and Jamie Woodcock, Open University
Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Penn State University
