Abstract

Recently, there has been growing academic and political interest in the working conditions of platform workers. Based on a conceptual literature review of sociological and industrial relations accounts, we find that working conditions in platform work are often – yet rarely explicitly – assessed according to criteria similar to those applied to the quality of jobs outside the gig economy. We argue that future research would benefit from analytical schemes that enable a systematic and differentiated analysis of working conditions in platform work. We discuss the advantages and challenges of applying existing job-quality frameworks to platform work and present a suggestion for modifications that consider the particularities of platform work. The use of such a novel analytical framework could help systematise evidence available from qualitative research, promote the heretofore rare initiatives of quantitative representative data collection, and hopefully inspire theoretical developments at the interface of job quality and platform work.