Livelihoods in the Platform Economy Ecosystem

2026-07-22

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.

Ireland

2026-02-01