I've worked with the supremely talented John Philip Sage to produce a poster about the factors that shape the gig economy and the principles that might, one day, come to define the jobs in it. The ideas in the poster come both from the work I’ve done with the Fairwork team, and from my book on the Gig Economy (with Jamie Woodcock). You can download full-size versions in purple or black on the Fairwork website. I’ll be screen-printing about 20 of these. If you’d like a physical copy, please send me a note with your address and a note about where you’d like to hang it ..read more

The study of platform-mediated gig work has granted insufficient critical attention to questions of migration and migrant labour. My colleagues, Niels van Doorn, Fabian Ferrari, and Srujana Katta, and I, are putting together a theme issue of Environment and Planning A to address that gap (see also our working paper on Migration and Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy). One set of questions that contributors to the theme issue may address concerns the structural role of migrant labour in sustaining the gig economy. Without a steady influx of migrants, platform companies like Uber, Ola, Helpling ..read more

I have a new article out in Urban Geography. In it, I explore why thinking about the geographies of platforms is of crucial importance if we are to tame their power. Graham, M. 2020. Regulate, replicate, and resist – The conjunctural geographies of platform urbanism. Urban Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2020.1717028 Summary: It may seem as if digital platforms represent an inevitable urban future of capitalism stripped down to its essentials. Platforms in the urban environment are fundamentally reshaping urban geographies while being apparently too big to control, too new to regu ..read more

I have a new publication coming out soon in the Review of African Political Economy, with my colleague Amir Anwar.    Summary In discussions about the locations that make up the key productive nodes of the digital economy, African workers rarely gets a mention. The main aim of our paper is to make visible the invisible and bring light to the role African workers are playing in developing key emergent and everyday digital technologies such as autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems. Once we acknowledge that many contemporary digi ..read more

I have a new publication out with my colleague Amir Anwar that draws on the years of research we have done with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Details, and a link to download the paper are below. Anwar, M. A. and Graham, M. (Forthcoming) Hidden Transcripts of the Gig Economy: Labour Agency and the New Art of Resistance among African Gig Workers. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. Abstract In this article, we examine how remote gig workers in Africa exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods in the gig economy. In addition to the rewards reaped by gig workers ..read more

I have a new book out today: The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction.  The book, co-authored with Jamie Woodcock, presents a comprehensive overview of the gig economy. It draws upon years of research, stories from gig workers, and a review of the key trends and debates, in order to shed light on how the gig economy came to be, how it works and what it’s like to work in it. What we argue is that although it has facilitated innovative new services and created jobs for millions, it is not without cost. It allows businesses and governments to generate value while passing significant risk and resp ..read more

My colleagues, Rob, Shannon, Joe, and I recently put together a book of speculative fiction that tries to imagine what cities would be like if run by corporations. Graham, M, Kitchin, R., Mattern, S., and Shaw, J. (eds). 2019. How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. London: Meatspace Press. Each of the 38 chapters in the book picks a different company and then envisions a world governed by it. As part of the exercise, I had the opportunity to write about Alphabet (Google’s parent company). The story plays with the idea that companies like Google/Alphabet control an important dimension ..read more

Should cities be run like businesses? Should city services and infrastructure be run by businesses? For some urban commentators, policy-makers, politicians and corporate lobby groups, the answer is ‘yes’ to both questions. Others are critical of such views, cautious about shifting the culture of city administration from management to entrepreneurship, and transforming public assets and services run for the common good into markets run for profit. The stories and essays in our new book, How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables, explore how a city might look, feel and function if the busi ..read more

Call for papers: Digital Work in the Planetary Market Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers Denver, Colorado April 6-10, 2020 Session Organizers: Mark Graham, Fabian Ferrari Work, and the networks that extract value from it, are increasingly embedded into planetary systems. As ever more work is commodified and traded beyond local labour markets, this session seeks to focus on those systems that purport to pay little attention to the locations in which work is done. Workers embedded into digital production networks produce immaterial outputs. Those outputs can be instantly t ..read more

I’m very happy to announce the first sharable details about my new forthcoming book (co-authored with Jamie Woodcock). The book will be out in November, but you can already pre-order it with a 20% discount using this form or the code GIG20 on the Polity Books website. The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction  Jamie Woodcock & Mark Graham  From the reviews:  ‘Challenging and important, giving voice to workers on the front line of our growing gig economy. A must read for trade unionists, policymakers and everyone with an interest in making work better amidst rapid tech change’.  Frances O ..read more