Old Media, New Gigs: The Discursive Construction of the Gig Economy in Australian News Media

Luci Pangrazio, Cameron Bishop and Fiona Lee
Additional contact information
Luci Pangrazio: Deakin University, Australia
Cameron Bishop: Deakin University, Australia
Fiona Lee: Deakin University, Australia

Work, Employment & Society, 2023, vol. 37, issue 3, 606-624

Abstract: This article analyses the representation of the gig economy in three Australian newspapers from 2014 to 2019. ‘Gig work’ is defined as short term, contract or freelance employment and is seen by many social institutions as the future of work. Drawing on a corpus of 426 articles, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is used to examine the construction of the ‘gig economy’ in the cultural imaginary. Five key elements emerge, including: demographics of workers; working conditions; workers’ rights; resistance and regulation; and change and disruption. Despite multiple competing discourses evident across the newspapers, each constructs the gig economy as an inexorable phase in the evolution of the relationship between capital and the worker. The article critically analyses the construction of the discourse, including the difficulties of regulating gig economy platforms and the narrative of inevitability used to describe changes to work and life brought about by technology.

Keywords: de/reindustrialisation; discourse theory; gig economy; gig work; platform capitalism; Uber (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211034663 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:37:y:2023:i:3:p:606-624

DOI: 10.1177/09500170211034663

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().