Consumption, work, and platform economy: a critical view
Over the last decade, the business world has experienced abrupt changes due to the irruption of the platform economy. E-commerce giants and application-based business models have become key spaces in the economy, facilitating consumption in terms of convenience, immediacy, and availability. However, these new ways of organizing services, while easing the consumer experience, have controversial effects on the organization of work. This article provides a critical reflection on the newly emerging jobs in the platform economy sector. It will highlight the importance of the imaginary of consumption as a key enabler of these changes in employment.
ODS
Professor in the sociology department of the Autonomous University of Madrid. He specializes in the sociology of work, consumption, and organizations, with particular interest in Critical Management Studies. Editor-in-chief of the Revista Española de Sociología (RES) and was president of the Research Committee into the Sociology of Consumption of the FES from 2009 to 2020. He has published dozens of articles and book chapters on these topics and is also the author of several books, the most recent of which are Estudios sociales sobre el consumo (coordinated by Luis Enrique Alonso and Rafael Ibáñez Rojo, CIS, 2020) and Sociología de las Organizaciones Económicas (with Rafael Ibáñez Rojo and Pedro Romero Balsas, 2021).