My formal training is in the sociology of work, but my work crosses over into labor studies, informatics, organizational studies/management, and education. My research methods are primarily qualitative in nature, but depending on the research question, I employ the appropriate methodology.

The majority of my current research efforts bridge two of my areas of interest: contingent work and technology. My research is framed by the realities of three changes to labor market arrangements that give rise to contingent work being done online: (1) A shift to digitally-enabled remote work that has accelerated since COVID-19’s arrival; (2) shifts in labor toward knowledge work and service jobs as engines of the economy; and (3) shifts in employment arrangements, from the career, to the job, to the project. It is within this context that I situate the three specific areas my current research interrogates: career trajectories of platform workers, the different dimensions of “flexibility” and the implications for workers, and digital entrepreneurship.

Research at the Confluence of Technology and Work

Much of my current work builds on my previous studies in which I began exploring “gig work” or “platform-mediated work” as a growing form of contingent work. Gig work consists of income-earning activities outside of standard, long-term employer-employee relationships, and in the case of my research, I focus on gig work that is done on an on-demand/freelance basis mediated by digital platforms. Uber is a well-known example of this kind of work. Gig work has been identified as an important and growing sector of the economy, and my work interrogates the implications of this type of work. I have authored or co-authored several articles related to this research, including “Making Gigs Work: Job Quality and Motivation in the Gig Economy” in New Technology, Work and Employment, “Digital Work: New Opportunities or Lost Wages?” in American Journal of Management, “Work Precarity, Gig Literacies, and Online Freelancing” in Work, Employment and Society, and “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs in the Gig Economy” in Perspectives on Work.

I am working on a large data collection effort in which I am following a panel of 70 platform workers longitudinally and to date have completed over 450 interviews since 2019. The project’s analytical strategy includes three distinct, complementary components: cross-sectional comparisons of each panel, longitudinal comparisons across the panel, and comparative case analysis. This fall, I will begin the process of creating structured case studies of each respondent. The structured cases will serve as the basis for fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The project will use fsQCA to analyze fixed sets (e.g., age and gender) with fuzzy set depictions of career choices (e.g., role of contingent work in their career). I have several publications from this effort, including “Platform-mediated Markets, Online Freelance Workers and Deconstructed Identities,” in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, “New futures of work or continued marginalization? The rise of online freelance work and digital platforms,” in the 2022 Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work, and “Distancing bonus or downscaling loss? The changing livelihood of US online workers in times of COVID-19” in Journal of Economic and Social Geography.

Another area of research focus is flexibility. Flexibility is recognized as one of the major shifts in the future of work and workplaces. Work flexibility is a common denominator of many non-standard arrangements, where workers enjoy more autonomy over how they fulfill their work responsibilities. Flexible work arrangements now embrace a broadening range such as compressed hours, flextime, co-working, contracting, platform work (e.g., online freelancing), digital labor (e.g., micro-tasking), nomadic work, and portfolio careers. Scholarship on platform workers has predominantly focused on only one dimension of flexibility: flexible scheduling. This is not a coincidence, as flexible scheduling is at the core of the platform economy because of the legal status of workers. Since they’re contract workers, flexible work scheduling is, at least in part, a structural component of platform work. Because of this, much less attention has been paid to other factors that may contribute to or undermine other attributes of flexibility for platform workers. I see this as an opportunity to further demarcate key dimensions of work flexibility that influence the experience of platform workers. To that end, I have several publications that further demarcate dimensions of flexibility, including “The Great Realization: Online Freelancers and the Meaning of Flexibility,” in Research in the Sociology of Work, “Dynamics of flexible work and digital platforms: Task and spatial flexibility in the platform economy,” in Digital Business, “Gender Differences and Lost Flexibility in Online Freelancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in Frontiers in Sociology, and “Flexible Work and Personal Digital Infrastructures,” in Communications of the ACM.

I have recently started a project exploring “digital entrepreneurship.” Digital entrepreneurship research seeks to understand how digital technologies shape and are shaped by entrepreneurial processes and contexts. I am specifically looking at entrepreneurs who started agencies on the Upwork platform. For this project, I am examining two specific aspects of digital entrepreneurship – founder attributes and organizational structures of online agencies. More specifically, I am reconceptualizing Covin and Slevin’s entrepreneurial orientation construct and Smith, Schallenkamp, and Eichholz’s entrepreneurial skills assessment of founders within the context of digital entrepreneurship. Data collection has begun, and I anticipate interviewing 25–30 founders in total. This current effort serves as a “pilot” for a large-scale longitudinal study that will mirror my current large NSF study. I am targeting the NSF Science of Organizations (SoS) program (located in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences {SES} within the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences {SBE}). I will be applying to the upcoming program solicitation with a target due date of February 2025. I see this longitudinal study as an opportunity to study the organizational life cycle of digital entrepreneurship.

Exploring Emerging Topics in Work

I was recently awarded a second NSF grant focusing on creating artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced digital tools to amplify freelance workers’ ability to work in online labor markets. This research is important because online freelancing– in which professionals work on a collection of individual tasks, outside of traditional workplaces — is rapidly becoming a significant component of modern labor markets. Online freelancers need to market themselves, find well-paying and skill-enhancing jobs, and be able to perform and get credit for quality work. However, online labor markets make it hard to do this at times because of their design: their policies are often more friendly to employers than to freelancers, while their algorithms for matching people with jobs and prices are often opaque to workers. The key idea of this project is that AI-enhanced digital tools may be able to help workers better-manage their profiles, workload, and task performance.

To achieve this goal, the research effort leverages human-centered design principles. Working with a carefully selected and steadily updated sample of online freelancers, data will be gathered through interviews and focus groups to identify and advance the functionality and needs of AI-enabled tools to support these workers. Over three years and through multiple design, deployment, and feedback cycles, the project will collaborate with organizations dedicated to supporting online workers. This fall, my colleagues and I will begin working with online freelancers to develop and evaluate a number of prototypes that counter these problems.