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ABSTRACT
While there have been numerous – mostly qualitative – studies on the experience and the conditions of platform labour, the exploratory potential of biographical research has so far been overlooked. This article responds to this gap in research by presenting a case study of a French crowdworker, who was interviewed in the context of a larger European research project on precariousness and unpaid labour. On the basis of her autobiographical narrative, the authors reconstruct how her relationship with two online labour platforms evolved throughout the course of two years. The aim of this article is to illustrate the benefits of adopting a longitudinal, process-oriented perspective on the experience of online gig work in a biographical context. By giving informants the time and space to openly narrate and reflect about how their lives evolved, it also becomes possible for them to work through difficult past experiences and gain new perspectives. Furthermore, this research approach can be a tool to amplify ‘voices from below’ as a corrective against powerful corporate strategies. The authors aim to make the process of interpreting autobiographical narrative interviews transparent by highlighting the analytical relevance of selected formal textual features.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. We would like to thank our two anonymous reviewers for the constructive and encouraging comments on an earlier draft of this article.
2. Fritz Schütze started working with narrative interviews in the 1970s, partly being influenced by and influencing the work of Anselm Strauss on Grounded Theory. Schütze’s approach is in numerous ways different from the biographic-narrative-interpretive method (BNIM), popularised in English speaking countries by Tom Wengraf and Prue Chamberlayne in the 1990s. As the technique of interviewing is quite similar in both approaches, the analytical procedures are different. In comparison to Schütze’s method, BNIM is less focused on the sociolinguistic textual structures of the biographical interview. Following the work of Gabrielle Rosenthal, the latter makes a distinction between lived life and told story, while in Schütze’s approach the emphasis is put on the identification of ‘process structures’ or structural processes (institutional expectation patterns of the life course, biographical action schemes, trajectories of suffering and creative biographical metamorphoses) which are revealed in certain presentation markers in an autobiographical impromptu narrative (Schütze Citation2008; Svašek and Domecka Citation2012).
3. See Riemann (Citation2018) as an example of a detailed structural description of a sequence in a narrative interview.
4. For the sake of preserving anonymity, we masked the narrator’s name, locations, the name of the labour platforms and other details without risking the distortion of meaning.
5. Schütze (Citation2008, part II, 42–43) writes about background constructions that they ‘demonstrate that extempore autobiographical narrations express even personal experiences that the narrator tended to fade out of her or his awareness since they were so difficult, hurting, or shameful. Background constructions are self-corrections of the narrator regarding the course of her or his narrative rendering at points of its implausibility. They are quite often initiated by the narrator her- or himself, when during her or his permanent self-monitoring she or he realises that the course of presentation becomes questionable, inconsistent, discrepant, or even contradictory, enigmatic, phoney, etc. Then the narrator is driven by the narrative constraint of going into details. The narrator understands that something is missing between the rendering of event A and the following rendering of event B (…). (.) in extempore autobiographical story telling she or he is most concerned about the plausibility of her recapitulation of personal experiences to her- or himself. The narrator would like to understand difficult experiences she or he had forgotten (…) up to now or enigmatic experiences she or he had forgotten about. (…)
Background construction react to chaotic phases in the extempore recollection of personal experiences; in a certain sense their repair mechanism should bring back order into the chaotic phases of narrative rendering and the connected recollections of sedimented biographical experiences. But they normally accomplish this without any polishing, refurbishing, and euphemistic reinterpretation of the recollected experiences, if and when they can fully unfold and carry through their repair job. Insofar the insertion of background constructions is the diametrical contrast to fading out, rationalisation, and legitimising, on the level of the dominant line of narrative rendering. The order that is introduced by the fully-accomplished background construction is much more complicated than the original order of the narrative rendering. Therefore, background constructions are an important means for creative biographical work.’
6. A critical reader of a first draft of our article wrote: ‘Narratives in the telling are rarely perfectly sequential, so it is not surprising that someone would take a step back and tell something they forgot to tell.’ We agree. We just think it is worthwhile to take a closer look at such phenomena in biographical impromptu narratives. Where do they occur? How are they provoked in the unfolding of the narrative? And is there something remarkable about the experiences which are revealed in such background constructions?
7. One example: In Belgium, we interviewed a woman who trained as a literary translator but had not worked in her profession for two years. After the interview, she became active again and translated two theatre plays that were about to be turned into productions. Eight months after our meeting, she emailed us again stating the following: ‘In a way, speaking to you was an electroshock about how I let my professional path derail and it set me back on track.’
8. We would like to thank our anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this aspect.
9. This is the case of ResPecTMe project, where the theorisation developed on the basis of analysis of biographical narrative data informed the design of the quantitative part of the study.
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Notes on contributors
Mê-Linh Riemann
Mê-Linh Riemann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, working within the project ‘Urban Platform Economies: Transformations of labour and intersectional inequalities in care services (TICS)’. She previously held a position at the Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven. She has a special interest in biographical research methods, economic crises, migration, precarious work and the platform economy. Her work has appeared in Leuven University Press, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Contemporary Social Science and Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia.
Claudia Marà
Claudia Marà is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven (Belgium), working within the framework of the ERC-funded REsPecTMe project. Her research interests include working conditions and unpaid labour in the digital platform economy, as well as industrial relations and collective action in the changing world of work. Her work appeared in The Economic and Labour Relations Review, the European Journal Of Industrial Relations, Transfer-European Review of Labour and Research and Work in the Global Economy.
Markieta Domecka
Markieta Domecka is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton Business School and a Fellow at the Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven. She specialises in qualitative research methods (especially autobiographical narrative approach) and mix-method research in the fields of work and employment, unpaid labour, precarity and inequality, viewed through the lens of class, gender and ethnicity. Her work appeared in Human Relations, Work, Employment and Society, Cambridge Journal of Economics, British Journal of Industrial Relations, International Labour Review, and Gender, Place & Culture
Valeria Pulignano
Valeria Pulignano, Professor of Sociology at CESO – KU Leuven and Francqui Stichting Research Professorship. Research interests are sociology of work, comparative industrial (employment) relations, precarious work, labour markets inequality and voice at work. Recent book: Shifting Solidarities, with Ine van Hoyweghen and Gert Meyers, Palgrave-MacMillan; Reconstructing Solidarity, Labour Unions, Precarious Work, and the Politics of Institutional Change in Europe, with Virginia Doellgast and Nathan Lillie, OUP.