Future Ways of Working in the Digital Economy

We investigate how individuals work coordinate, communicate and collaborate within and outside of traditional organizations and increasingly mediated by digital technologies. In particular, we investigate how workers' function, status, as well as sense of belonging and meaning are impacted by digital workplaces and online platforms. Our research is structured into three themes focusing on macro-, meso-, and micro-dimensions of the digital economy respectively, and is intended to help understand and create conditions for the design of inclusive labor environment for a fair and meaningful digital economy. Based on a mapping of the digital economy, the project investigates the role of organizations, institutions, and platforms, in the shaping of experiences of digital labour. This includes enquiries into contexts of the gig economy, large-scale online communities, virtual and remote work setups and the broader networked public sphere. Over the course of the last years, we in particular worked on the following questions: Who are digital platforms envisioning as their users and how can they ensure inclusive and fair platform experiences? Through a number of workshops and articles and conference participations, we try to understand how platforms and organizations can ensure fair and inclusive platform experiences. Here, we take on a holistic perspective encompassing not just the view of the worker, but also viewpoints of clients and platforms and the relational tensions linked to working arrangements including both humans and non-human layers. We are interested in how these other parties in the triadic platform relationship view their own role and responsibility in ensuring meaningful platform experiences. In particular, we are also looking at traditional organizations to see how worker-centered measures (e.g. HRM) may be translated and enacted in the platform context. We also look into corporate profiling (systematic and purposeful recording and classification of data related to individuals) as an important development in the digital economy. We developed a transparency-by-design framework that takes transparency into account throughout the whole lifecycle of AI systems (work-in-progress). We also addressed transparency in the context of social robots, for example through the organization of workshops on overtrust in robots. Together with collaborators, we conducted surveys and interviews with participants from three organizations in Norway to investigate agile software development team members? digital interaction and experienced sociability working from home during pandemic lockdown. Our research findings indicate that teams that were better at having spontaneous communication cope better with the forced home working situation. This project and the interdisciplinary, multi-method and cross-community research efforts tied to it deepen our understanding of how individual digital workers can create a sense of belonging, meaningfulness, and mattering in the increasingly remote, decontextualized, and fragmented digital economy

We anticipate the findings of the project to be useful for different stakeholders in the future, including fellow academics, policymakers, and industry (e.g., platform workers themselves and platform managers). Specifically, they provide in-depth knowledge about the perceptions and work modalities of new forms of work, including crowdwork, online freelancing, the gig economy, sharing economy (e.g., short-term rentals, ride-hailing), and social media work. Some of the overarching implications are: - spotlighting prominent issues and challenges of new types of work such as poor working conditions, specifically among marginalized groups such as migrants, a lack of recognition in the form of low prestige and low perceived social value of much digital work, and heightened customer demands, for example in terms of emotional labor. This can lead to policy initiatives that try and strengthen the working conditions as well as the external perceptions. - discussing ethical aspects such as a lack of transparency and visibility of certain new types of work as well as their surveillance (privacy infringements), especially in the domain of AI development and training. Making these issues more visible and giving the workers a voice can empower them and can create wider social awareness. - Introducing opportunities of new work modalities, for example in terms of flexibility and new forms of working. Overall, the research has been well received by the academic community, with considerable interest and impact across disciplines. Despite most publications from the project coming out since 2020, the outputs have accrued ample citation counts, for example. Taken together, the publications have had tens of thousands of views and downloads on the journal websites and on institutional repositories as well as commercial repositories (such as ResearchGate, SSRN), with the fact that they were published open access (many in gold open access journal) contributing substantially to this high uptake and thorough dissemination. Several outputs from the WP have been used by policy reports. Christoph Lutz was also invited to give experts talks for the Personvernkommisjon (https://personvernkommisjon.no/) in 2021 and for the The Norwegian Society of Engineers and Technologists (NITO) in 2023. In summer 2023, Christoph Lutz and Gemma Newlands started a collaboration with the International Labour Organization (ILO), putting together a joint working paper based on their recent research on occupational prestige and occupational social value of digital economy occupations, scheduled to be published in the coming months.

As digital labor markets continue to grow, transferring the risks and costs onto workers while profiting from their labor, it is critical that the experience of the individual digital worker is re-prioritised as a focus within research and public discourse. Accordingly, we propose an in-depth empirical investigation into the function, status, and meaning creation of individual workers in the future digital economy. Research along three work packages, focusing on macro-, meso-, and micro- dimensions of the digital economy respectively, will result in the development of inclusive labor designs for a fairer digital economy. For the macro-dimension, this project will commence with a thorough mapping of the current and future digital economy. For the meso-dimension, the project will investigate the roles of organizations and institutions, especially the pivotal role of platforms, in shaping the experiences of digital labor. The micro-dimension refers to the situational experiences of digital workers, where we will explore questions of digital literacy and preparedness, identity, and status. As an overall driving construct, this project aims to understand how individual digital workers can create a sense of belonging, meaningfulness, and mattering in the increasingly remote, decontextualized, and fragmented digital economy. We research this topic from a multi-disciplinary social science perspective, including a variety of cutting edge methodological approaches as well as research contexts. The research will include elements of both a critical and emancipatory lens, while remaining grounded at its core within a strong empirical perspective. By aggregating our findings in actionable deliverables for stakeholders across business, education, and public policy, as well as in high-quality academic output, we intend to shed light on how responsibility for protecting the individual workers from exploitation and alienation in the future digital economy is shared among everyone.