Research · Project
Careers Under Algorithmic Management
Seventy online workers, interviewed year after year since 2019. More than 450 conversations about what a career looks like when an algorithm is the manager.
Most research on gig work is cross-sectional: a survey, a wave of interviews, a snapshot. This project is built on the opposite premise. Since 2019 we have followed the same panel of 70 US-based online freelancers, returning to each of them repeatedly to understand how their work, their sense of themselves, and their livelihoods change over time, through the pandemic and after it.
What we ask
How do careers unfold when work is mediated by a platform? What does "success" mean to the people doing this work, and how does it differ from what platforms measure? How do gender, race, and occupation shape who thrives, who stalls, and who leaves? And what does flexibility, the platform economy's central promise, actually deliver?
How we work
The analytical strategy has three complementary components: cross-sectional comparison within each wave of interviews, longitudinal comparison across waves, and comparative case analysis. We are now building structured case studies of each respondent, which will serve as the basis for fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), combining crisp sets such as age and gender with fuzzy-set depictions of career choices, such as the role contingent work plays in a person's career.
What we have found so far
The panel has produced work on the platformization of inequality by gender and race, on gender and careers over time, on worker-centered definitions of success, on the meaning of flexibility after the "great realization" of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic redistributed work between online freelancers. Publications from the project are listed on the publications page.