Abstract:  A great deal of the literature has underlined how job quality is a key element in individual well‐being. However, the rise in platform work challenges this issue, since not only do “plat‐firms” play an increasingly important role in job matching, work organization, and industrial relations, but they also increase the risks of a poorly inclusive socio‐technical system in terms of the quality of working conditions and accessibility. In this sense, the platform economy is intertwined with multiple forms of social exclusion by acting on pre‐existing inequalities that stratify workers within the labor market. This is particularly true in Italy, a country with a strongly dualistic labor market, which leads to a remarkable gap between insider and outsider workers. Therefore, the goal of our analysis is to evaluate the impact of the platform model on job quality in the Italian context. This will be accomplished by adopting an integrated and multidimensional perspective through the application of the OECD Job Quality Framework. The analysis identifies how job quality is differently affected by the type of platform work involved in terms of creating differentiated patterns of social inclusion/exclusion in the case of platform workers.

Keywords:  digital ethnography; digital labor; peripheral labor market; platform economy; well‐being; working conditions

Published:   15 November 2023

Issue:   Vol 11, No 4 (2023): Digitalization of Working Worlds and Social Inclusion