The Gig Rights Project is funded by British Academy Grant: SRG2021\210344.
The Gig Rights Project is led by Dr Alex J. Wood at the University of Birmingham. Alex is an economic sociologist and specialises in employment relations. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. His most recent research investigates working conditions, worker voice, organisation and collective action in the gig economy. His publications include the book ‘Despotism on Demand’ (Cornell University Press) and articles for leading academic journals, such as: Sociology; Work, Employment and Society; Human Relations; Socio-Economic Review.
Professor Brendan Burchell is a co-investigator of the Gig Rights Project. Brendan is the Professor in the Social Sciences at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Brendan is a researcher in DIGIT, the ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre. His main research interests centre on the effects of labour market conditions on wellbeing. Recent publications have focussed on reducing working hours and the future of work, unemployment, job insecurity, work intensity, part-time work, zero-hours contracts, debt, occupational gender segregation job quality and self-employment. He works in interdisciplinary environments with psychologists, sociologists, economists, lawyers and human geographers.
Dr Nicholas Martindale is a partner in the Gig Rights Project. Nick is a sociologist and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His current research focuses on the class structure of modern Britain, protest and occupational mobility in the gig economy, and the state school system. He has published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education and has researched the gig economy as a member of the iLabour and CrowdLearn projects at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Shuting is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Christ’s College under the supervision of Dr Brendan Burchell and Prof Peter Williamson. Shuting’s PhD thesis focuses on the self-employed migrant workers in China. Using a mixed research method, the project seeks to examine the quality of self-employment and the working life of the own-account migrants in contemporary Chinese society.
Selected relevant publications by the team:
- Algorithmic Management: Consequences for Work Organisation and Working Conditions.
- Alienation is not ‘bullshit’: an empirical critique of Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs Theory’.
- Antagonism beyond employment: how the ‘subordinated agency’ of labour platforms generates conflict in the remote gig economy.
- An exploration of the multiple motivations for spending less time at work.
- Spatial and temporal segmenting of urban workplaces: The gendering of multi-locational working.
- Networked but Commodified: The (Dis)Embeddedness of Digital Labour in the Gig Economy.
- Good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy.
- The Taylor Review: Understanding the gig economy, dependency and the complexities of control.
- Job quality in European employment policy: one step forward, two steps back?
- A shorter working week for everyone: How much paid work is needed for mental health and well-being?
- Does Outsourcing School Systems Degrade Education Workforces? Evidence from 18,000 English State Schools.
- Workers of the Internet unite? Online freelancer organisation in six Asian and African countries.