A ‘working lives’ approach to platform work: accounting for informality, social reproduction, and gender norms

Asiya Islam, Silvana Galeano Alfonso and Jésica Lorena Pla

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Building on recent interventions in platform work scholarship that centre social reproduction and draw attention to informal economies in the Global South, this paper advances a ‘working lives’ framework to account for the entanglements of production/reproduction, informality and precarity, and gender norms in the shaping of platform work. Based on interviews with women engaged in delivery work through digital platforms in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Delhi, India, the paper shows that women enter platform delivery work compelled by adverse socio-economic conditions and work-life histories of informality. Women organise their participation in platform delivery work, making use of its location flexibility, for and around the needs of the household. Further, they operationalise this flexibility to navigate gendered constraints, such as, curtailed radius of work to ensure safety and continued responsibility for housework and childcare. The paper, empirically novel in accounting for narratives of women in the Global South, offers the analytical framework of ‘working lives’, combining long-term and place-based perspectives with everyday perspectives, with attention to social norms, for research on platform work globally.

Keywords: digital technology; gender inequalities; Global South; informality; platform work; precarity; social reproduction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2025-10-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-iue
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Critical Sociology, 20, October, 2025. ISSN: 0896-9205

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/128920/ Open access version. (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/128920/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/128920/)

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:ehl:lserod:128920

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().