Abstract
Platform firm in the gig-economy are disrupting work as a social practice, production systems and recasting capital-labour relations. This qualitative study examines worker agency in the Australian food-delivery sector; a segment where platforms actively intermediate both product and labour markets. Within this sector, worker agency poses a potential challenge to platform-organisations; however this study reveals how these platforms’ work organisation and market regulation constrain agency potential. Shaped by the work’s spatio-temporal features, organisational fixes and institutional context, it is shown how food-delivery workers, transiently attached to the labour market, predominantly engage in ‘entrepreneurial agency’ – a low-level agency expression aimed at materially improving individual conditions and aligning with, rather than challenging, platforms’ business models.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
2020
Publication Title
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Publisher
Sage Publications
School
School of Business and Law
RAS ID
31410
Funders
Edith Cowan University - Open Access Support Scheme 2020
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Comments
Barratt, T., Goods, C., & Veen, A. (2020). ‘I’m my own boss…’: Active intermediation and ‘entrepreneurial’worker agency in the Australian gig-economy. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(8).
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20914346