MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Reclaiming the Gig Economy

Platform-based work hasn’t delivered on its promises. Can worker-owned cooperatives do better?

Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, isn’t the first to cast a skeptical eye on the so-called sharing economy. But her new book, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back (University of California Press, 2020), provides a longer and deeper view of these platform-based businesses thanks to research she and her team of graduate students have conducted since 2011. The book traces the evolution of companies brokering services such as local transport and lodging, from their quasi-idealistic origins to purely commercial businesses where revenue growth is often at the expense of the people actually delivering the services. MIT Sloan Management Review recently spoke with Schor — who, in addition to being a sociologist, also earned a Ph.D. in economics and taught the subject at Harvard for 17 years — to find out where the sharing economy has fallen short and how it could be improved.