Supposedly emblematic of digital capitalism, the rise of the gig economy is frequently taken as a cipher for the developing deindustrialisation of western societies. It is tempting to interpret the shift of manufacturing jobs to the global south and their replacement with service sector jobs as a one-way street, leading to the demise of decent work and the rise of work characterized by precarity, low pay, low skill and a non-unionized workforce. However, the reality is inevitably more complex. In the first place, pessimism may be attributed to a rose-tinted view of the experience of former industrial employment in the global north resulting from a questionable assumption about the nature of the jobs that occupied most people in former industrial societies. Certainly, deindustrialisation is not leading to “de-working,” that is, working less for the same money. With respect to gig work, autonomy and flexibility are central to labor inducement and hence labor control. Yet at the same time, and linked to the latter, we need to explore another deep-rooted phenomenon: the persistence of work space collectivism. Our evidence derives from qualitative interviews with gig workers in the food delivery sector in a number of European countries. We highlight the extent to which couriers profess a variety of understandings of the character of platform economy labor processes. A range of narratives emerge including platform work as leisure, as economic opportunity, and as collectivist labor. Moreover, individuation, attendant upon the character of the physical labor process, did not lead in any straightforward way to individualism in social labor processes—contrary to our expectations, we in fact witnessed forms of collectivism. Collectivism is to be distinguished from “types of solidarity” described by Morgan and Pulignano ( 2020 ) whereby neo-liberalism has transformed a range of institutional forms of labor solidarities. By contrast, we are concerned with the persistence of the collective worker within the changing sociological structure of work. This echoes the earlier finding by Stephenson and Stewart ( 2001 ) that collectivism endures even when behaviourally absent and indeed even in the context of individualized working—termed “whispering shadow.” Thus, the objective of the paper is to explore the forms of actor individualism and collectivism identified in our research. Given platform apps' external control, the gig economy spatially separates workers while at the same time requiring cognition of colleagues' collective work and labor process. Notwithstanding structural processes separating workers-in-work, platforms also witness the instantiation of forms of collectivism. Deindustrialisation is neither the end to collectivism nor trade unionism. Rather than post-work, then, we explore the problematics of plus work and variant collectivisms.

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This article contributes to on-going research on social business models by establishing a link with arguably one of the most salient global challenges we are confronted with today: economic exclusion. We conceive of economic exclusion broadly as a lack of access to salaried employment, finance, or essential goods and services. Addressing how and to what extent social business models can alleviate economic exclusion, we first review and synthesize various bodies of literature on grand challenges and social business models to unpack the constitutive factors of economic exclusion and the constraints social businesses face in their attempts to alleviate them. Based on these insights, and inspired by former works, we draw up a typology of 12 ideal-type social business models. In doing so, we illustrate how each model operates, based on the specific configuration of business model elements required to overcome the relevant barriers underpinning economic exclusion. The main contribution the paper makes is to advance a typology of ideal-type social business models covering the diverse constraints pertaining to economic exclusion. In concluding, we reflect on this contribution, its limitations and avenues for future research.

It seems natural to understand organizational democracy as granting members of the organization the right to choose the rules that govern their actions. But what meaning does a rule have if one can choose to change rather than follow it? By investigating the understudied dimension of democracy I call revisability, this paper suggests that an organization’s rules can be meaningful – they can effectively coordinate action – while remaining continually open to democratic modification. To support this claim, I present an activist ethnography of the Open Food Network, an alternative organization that builds open-source software for the decentralized coordination of short food chains, working in a democratic, non-hierarchical manner. Using the communicative constitution of organizations literature to conceptualize the requirements of democratic revisability and coordinating rules, I argue that this case demonstrates the possibility of achieving both ends simultaneously through the affordances of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This paper thus contributes an account of the concept of democratic revisability, and a generalized model of one means by which democratically revisable and effective coordinating rules can be established and maintained with the support of ICT affordances.