5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The rise of online labor platforms (OLPs) has been said to change the world of work significantly: They release people from organizational control and promise better work-life balance. So far, the literature has concentrated on exploring what platforms do and how they control workers regardless of their intention, which raises the question of misclassification in many societies. This session seeks to capture the impacts of the OLPs as a change of labor market institutions distinctively taking an economic sociological and comparative perspective. Taking this perspective, the rise of the OLPs could be seen as a further liberalization of the labor market supported by the advancement of digital technology. The OLPs earn profit by facilitating matching demands and supplies of labor by using ICT/AI technology. In this sense, they are labor market actors (regardless of their self-identification). Their activities might drive the labor market to be more market-oriented by adding and expanding alternatives to the existing institutionalized patterns of employment-centered society in the forms of self-employment, clearer/narrower job demarcation, spot-based matching transactions, spot-based market wages, extremely short-term contracts, opaque control or lack of it, and their often deteriorating effects on the coverage of social securities. Examining the changes in these aspects in the different social contexts will help us to understand the common social force behind the changes.