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Juliet B Schor, Review of “After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 1, September 2021, Page e20, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab044
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The growth of the platform economy has generated a massive outpouring of research on digitally mediated economic transactions, a strategically vital sector that answers to many names. Among the most common are platform capitalism or the gig, on-demand, and sharing economy. This conceptual slippage hints at one of the many limitations in the literature thus far: its inability to specify how platform work is reconfiguring the conventional economy, and with it, the quality of employment workers are likely to confront. Though important studies of labor platforms have emerged in recent years (e.g., Rosenblat 2018; Gray and Suri 2019; Ravenelle 2019), uncertainty on these questions still abounds. Thankfully, scholars have outgrown the tendency to use Uber as the prototype for platform work writ large, few studies have developed coherent frameworks that can account for the varied forms that platform work has assumed and the inequalities it engenders as it relentlessly expands.