In search of meaningful work on digital freelancing platforms: the case of design professionals

• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Linda Baines,Pelin Demirel,Ekaterina Nemkova
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12148
• Date: 01 November 2019

226 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2019 The Authors.

New Technology, Work and Employment

published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 34:3

ISSN 1468-005X

In search of meaningful work on digital

freelancing platforms: the case of design

professionals

Ekaterina Nemkova , Pelin Demirel and Linda Baines

Growth of the platform economy has been accompanied by critiques

of the fragmented, isolated and precarious nature of the employment

it offers. Yet, little is known about how creative freelancers per-

ceive the meaning of work on the platforms. Based on 40 interviews

with freelancers, clients, platform owners and industry experts, this

paper reveals that most freelancers are concerned about how operat-

ing through the platform, and their dependence on it, is undermining

the meaningfulness of their work. Freelancers nd that the platforms

are eroding both the manifest (i.e. monetary) and latent (i.e. non‐

monetary) meaning of their work although they are mostly con-

cerned about the latent element of meaning. The analysis reveals that

the small group of freelancers who pursue meaningful work and

earn a sustainable income on platforms are those with strong

entrepreneurial orientation.

Keywords: freelancing, meaningful work, platform economy,

precarity, global labour, entrepreneurship.

Introduction

The number of freelancers participating in digital freelancing platforms1 has increased over

the years to a point where most global platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk,

Upwork and Freelancer.com boast tens of millions of active members (Pongratz, 2018).

According to recent statistics, the use of platforms is growing globally by more than 25 per

cent per year (Lehdonvirta, 2018). Although some of these platforms focus on digital mi-

crowork where workers undertake small digital human‐computing tasks such as tagging

images and classifying text into categories, others provide opportunities for more creative

and complete work experiences, such as designing a company’s brand guidelines or logo,

and programming a website (Bergvall‐Kåreborn and Howcroft, 2013). This paper focuses

on creative professionals on digital freelancing platforms to examine the ‘meaningful

work’ construct in the context of platform economy jobs.

Different applications of the platform economy2 have been described in a positive

light as alleviating poverty (Hamari etal., 2016), empowering ordinary people through

Ekaterina Nemkova (Ekaterina.Nemkova@nottingham.ac.uk) is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at

Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, UK. Her research interests include

creativity, internationalization and global platform economy.

Pelin Demirel (P.Demirel@imperial.ac.uk) is a Senior Lecturer of Innovation and Enterprise at Dyson

School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, UK. Her research is focused on exploring the

potential of innovation and entrepreneurship for a more sustainable and inclusive society.

Linda Baines (L.B.Baines@soton.ac.uk) is a visiting researcher at Southampton Business School, Uni-

versity of Southampton, UK. Her research interests include inclusive entrepreneurship, social entrepre-

neurship and digital innovation.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Meaningful work on freelancing platforms 227

© 2019 The Authors.

New Technology, Work and Employment

published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

entrepreneurship and offering upward mobility (Holtgrewe, 2014; Schor, 2016); as

well as in a negative light as ‘neoliberalism on steroids’ (Murillo etal., 2017) and as

undermining the rights of workers, causing millions to live with continuous worry and

insecurity (BBC, 2017). While much has been written about the platform economy, this

has tended to focus on microwork activities and little is known about how creative

freelancers perceive the meaning of work on the platforms (Fieseler et al., 2019). Do

creative freelancers nd their work on the platforms more meaningful, empowering

and liberating compared to alternative work options? Or do they nd themselves stuck

with non‐fullling and precarious work? In order to address these questions in this

article, we develop an understanding of the prevailing work conditions in digital free-

lancing platforms and workers’ perceptions of the meaning of their work.

Workers increasingly attach more signicance to the meaning they attribute to work

(Goins, 2015). In ethics literature, meaningful work is considered ‘a fundamental hu-

man need’ (Yeoman, 2014: 235) while Marxian political economy emphasises the im-

portance of work as the means to realise the creative potential of an individual (Marx,

1977). Meaningful work in a holistic sense does not only meet people’s economic (con-

sumption) needs, but also provides them with creativity and freedom to express them-

selves in authentic ways (Spencer, 2015). Workers who are able to experience meaningful

work by aligning their work with their own interests, skills, values and passions are

claimed to also deliver a greater societal contribution through a deeper commitment to

work (Duffy and Dik, 2013; Bailey and Madden, 2016). The creative workforce is par-

ticularly focused on ‘meaningful work’ as it is central to derive satisfaction from work

beyond the simple means of earning a living, as expressed by Huws (2010: 510):

The [creative] worker does not only care about the monetary reward but also about the work’s

content (or intellectual property) which, even after it has been sold, may still be experienced as in

some sense ‘owned’ – something of which it is possible to be proud.

Understanding meaningful work depends not only on the work itself, but also on the

context in which that work takes place (Spencer, 2017). As the platform economy expands

and the nature of work is unavoidably reframed, concerns grow over platform jobs erod-

ing the meaningfulness of work that creative freelancers experience (Kalleberg and Dunn,

2016). Characteristics of platform economy work such as the presence of fragmented tasks

disconnected from the larger work project, rigid review and rating systems, and having to

always be ‘online’ can be seen as detrimental to the meaningful work construct (De Peuter,

2014; Kenney and Zysman, 2016; Schörpf etal., 2017; Lehdonvirta, 2018). Platform econ-

omy workers lack power in their relationships with clients, opening up potential avenues

of not only labour abuse and work intensication but also less meaningful work experi-

ences (Fieseler etal., 2019). Yet, the burgeoning literature does not examine what constitutes

meaning for creative workers in the platform economy, what detracts meaning for them in

platform employment, and who is more or less likely to experience meaningful work in the

digital freelancing platforms.

The paper’s contributions are twofold. First, it sheds light on work experiences on

digital freelancing platforms where a wide variety of different creative tasks and differ-

ent geographies are considered. This adds to a growing body of empirical literature on

digital freelancing by providing evidence on more complex and creative digital work

tasks in comparison to microwork. In particular, it provides insights into how freelanc-

ers undertaking these tasks perceive meaning in the platform economy work. Second,

the paper highlights how the platform economy mechanisms degrade different ele-

ments of meaning and why some creative freelancers are able to cope with these mech-

anism better than others. In doing so, the paper bridges scholarship on digital platforms,

meaningful work and entrepreneurship/self‐employment to capture the complex na-

ture of creative work practices on digital platforms. Based on the ndings, it is argued

that a small minority of freelancers remain resilient in the face of platform mechanisms

that degrade meaningful work through their entrepreneurial orientation.

The paper proceeds with a section that summarises the background literature on

meaningful work in the platform economy. The methodology employed in the study