Socio-technical issues in the platform-mediated gig economy: A systematic literature review: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

Abstract

The gig economy and gig work have grown quickly in recent years and have drawn much attention from researchers in different fields. Because the platform mediated gig economy is a relatively new phenomenon, studies have produced a range of interesting findings; of interest here are the socio-technical issues that this work has surfaced. This systematic literature review (SLR) provides a snapshot of a range of socio-technical issues raised in the last 12 years of literature focused on the platform mediated gig economy. Based on a sample of 515 papers gathered from nine databases in multiple disciplines, 132 were coded that specifically studied the gig economy, gig work, and gig workers. Three main socio-technical themes were identified: (1) the digital workplace, which includes information infrastructure and digital labor that are related to the nature of gig work and the user agency; (2) algorithmic management, which includes platform governance, performance management, information asymmetry, power asymmetry, and system manipulation, relying on a diverse set of technological tools including algorithms and big data analytics; (3) ethical design, as a relevant value set that gig workers expect from the platform, which includes trust, fairness, equality, privacy, and transparency. A social informatics perspective is used to rethink the relationship between gig workers and platforms, extract the socio-technical issues noted in prior research, and discuss the underexplored aspects of the platform mediated gig economy. The results draw attention to understudied yet critically important socio-technical issues in the gig economy that suggest short- and long-term opportunities for future research directions.