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A typology of online labor platforms
Online labor platforms, such as Uber, Mechanical Turk, and Care.com, hold the potential to transform the nature of employment. As the number of platforms continues to grow, the same term (“platform”) is being used to describe an increasingly wide array of services, which belies much of the variability in their nature. In this paper, I build a typology that serves to identify the important ways in which the platforms are similar, and in what ways they diverge. This typology identifies and analyzes the attributes of ten prominent categories of platforms by area of service: Transportation, Housework, Delivery, Hiring, Microwork, Therapy, Video, Professional Freelance, Hospitality, and Commerce. I find that certain attributes of platforms, such as the duration of working arrangements and the presence of rating systems, have important implications for organizational theory. Understanding the differences between platforms can help researchers understand platforms’ varying potential for altering work and organizations, and how organization theory may need to adapt to accommodate some of these changes but not others.Informatio