Platforms and Shared Economy: Precarity of Work or Building Agency?

The emergence of platforms and the associated idea of the shared economy have fostered a lot of research relating to the future of work. The question that arises is: does the advent of platform work enhance precarity of work as contracts become increasingly informal or does it build agency as the barriers to work participation decline? It is critical to understand the nuances of the ongoing processes and recognize the heterogeneity among platforms as precarity of work or agency may be a function of the nature of the platform and the type of work that it offers. This paper presents a tentative heuristic framework that can be used to understand precarity and agency in the context of the platform economy. This framework and some empirical evidence is used to compare two types of platforms in the food sector to understand the nuances of the processes at work.