Unveiling the Gig Economy: A Taxonomy of Digital Labour Platforms from a User Perspective

Kruse, Paul; Reiners, Sebastian; Fischer, Chiara; Becker, Jörg

Abstract

The importance of digital labour platforms as brokers for digital labour has grown in recent years. Despite some efforts that categorise sub-areas of the gig economy and digital labour platforms, there is yet to be an established generalised view on the characteristics to drill down into related topics. To provide this holistic view and reduce ambiguity as well as competing characterisations, we structure a multitude of characteristics of Digital Labour Platforms. More precisely, we develop a taxonomy following the methodology by Kundisch et al. (2022). The synthesised taxonomy, iteratively constructed in three cycles, consists of 13 dimensions and 36 characteristics embellished with characteristics of 51 analysed Digital Labour Platforms and concepts from literature. We furthermore demonstrate the taxonomy on two exemplary platforms and highlight how existing taxonomies relate to our proposed characterisation and artefact.

Keywords
gig economy; digital labour platform; online labour platform; digital work; online work