The gig economy has captured public and policy interest and is growing as an area of academic inquiry, prompting debate about the future of work, labour regulation, and the impact of technology and job quality. This special issue provides a timely intervention into that debate with this article providing an introductory overview, positioning the articles within a comprehensive literature review of existing scholarship on the gig economy. These articles add to our understanding of the organisation and experience of work in the digitally enabled gig economy in a variety of national settings. They explore aspects such as job quality, forms of collectivity, identity development, and algorithmic management and control. This article also delineates avenues for further research regarding conditions for gig workers, the impact of gig work and information, technology and gig work.

Purpose -Modern bureaucracies are under reconstruction, bureaucracy being no longer "modern"; they are becoming "post" bureaucratic. Defining the post-bureaucratic organization as a hybrid form provides insight into the intrinsic difficulties involved in the refurbishment of large complex organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine these difficulties empirically. Design/methodology/approach -The paper describes the case of an Australian public sector agency, subject to "corporatization" -a metamorphosis from a strictly public sector outlook to one that was imputedly more commercial. It focuses on the transition from personnel management to strategic HRM in the HR function. Findings -A series of difficulties affected these changes: difficulties in inventing a new identity; differences in perception of that identity; organizational philosophy towards strategic HRM; unsuitability of extent networks; and identity conflicts. Two factors emerge as the core explanation for the difficulties encountered: the "stickiness of identity" and the difficulties associated with network development. Originality/value -The paper outlines the difficulties experienced in the putative "refurbishment" of a large public sector agency as it made its way to "corporatization".

Purpose This research paper aims to examine how open innovation (OI) intermediaries facilitate knowledge collaboration between organizations and online user communities. Drawing on a Community of Practice (CoP) perspective on knowledge, the study lays out a framework of the knowledge boundary management mechanisms (and associated practices) that intermediaries deploy in enabling client organizations to engage in online community-based OI. Design/methodology/approach This research is based on an exploratory case study of an OI intermediary and 18 client organizations that engage with online user communities on the intermediary’s platform. Results incorporate both the intermediary and clients’ perspective, based on analysis of intermediary and client interviews, clients’ online community projects and other archival data. Findings Results reveal that OI intermediaries deploy three knowledge boundary management mechanisms – syntactic, semantic and pragmatic – each underpinned by a set of practices. Together, these mechanisms enable knowledge transfer, translation and transformation, respectively, and thus lead to cumulatively richer knowledge collaboration outcomes at the organization–community boundary. The findings show that the pragmatic mechanism reinforces both semantic and syntactic mechanisms, and is hence the most critical to achieving effective knowledge collaboration in community-based OI settings. Practical implications The findings suggest that OI intermediaries have to implement all three boundary management mechanisms to successfully enable knowledge collaboration for community-based OI. More specifically, intermediaries need to expand their focus beyond the development of digital platforms, to include nuanced efforts at building organizational commitment to community engagement. Originality/value Drawing on the CoP view, this study integrates the knowledge management literature into the OI literature to conceptualize the role of OI intermediaries in shaping knowledge collaboration between organizations and communities. In engaging with the interactive nature of knowledge exchange in such multi-actor settings, this research extends the firm-centric theorization of knowledge that currently dominates the existing OI research.

Although corporate alumni networks are a developing practice, academia has said very little about them and their members. In this article, our goal is to provide an account of how members of such networks construct themselves as alumni. To that end, we adopt a narrative approach to identity construction and empirically explore the identity work that the members of one corporate alumni network carry out in order to sustain their identification with a past organizational setting. Our case study leads us to document four ‘identity stratagems’ (Jenkins, 1996) through which members incorporate elements of their past professional experience into their self-narratives: nostalgia, reproduction, validation and combination. It thus allows for a better understanding of corporate alumni networks and their members, while also contributing to the broader identity literature by further documenting how organizational participants can incorporate elements of a past professional experience into their self-narratives.

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