Project description
Understanding the realities of platform work
Today’s digital platforms shape how millions of people find work across Europe. Nevertheless, the lived experiences behind these jobs remain poorly understood. The ERC-funded LivePlatforms project aims to change this by developing a new way to study platform labour as a whole ecosystem. The project introduces the Platform Livelihoods Ecosystem Approach (PLEA), a method that looks at how workers, platforms, clients, regulations, technologies, and everyday life circumstances interact to shape work outcomes. By applying and testing this approach at national scale, researchers will map the systems, actors, and pressures that define platform work today. The goal is to provide a framework for assessing how to make platform work fairer.
Objective
Work mediated by digital platforms – where the platform brokers labour relationships between worker and client, consumer, or other end user – has become an increasing feature of the employment landscape across Europe. Consequently, understanding the nature of this work has become an urgent need. The LivePlatforms project will develop and test a method for gathering qualitative data on the wide ecosystem that comprises platform work as a lived experience across a national context and critically appraise the mediating roles of the actors involved in this economy. The over-arching aim of this project is to develop a holistic understanding of platform labour by generating, applying, and evaluating a methodological framework that will enable the interrogation of the forces comprising the experience of this work, including and especially those of the lifeworld. By combining methodological concepts from Social Reproduction Theory, Actor Network Theory, and the Livelihoods Approach, it proposes the Platform Livelihoods Ecosystem Approach (PLEA). This methodology approaches platform work as an ecosystem of interacting actors, systems, and processes that manifest across a broad range of labour forms and which interconnect in the pursuit of a livelihood by workers. The objectives are to develop, test, and evaluate this method; to generate a complex understanding of the actors, systems, and processes that define a national platform economy and how they interact to produce labour outcomes; and to critically assess the mediating agency of these actors. The outcomes will be a rich, critical, empirical understanding of the lived experience of platform work and a tested method for qualitatively evaluating platform work on a national scale and with the necessary scope for holistic understanding. This method will provide the research underpinnings for further projects supporting the development of fair, secure, and decent work in this growing sector.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology ecosystems
- social sciences economics and business business and management employment
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
4 DUBLIN
Ireland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.