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Abstract This article explores platform workers’ strategies for producing sustainable, quality services within platform structures that simultaneously over- and under-determine their work. We present findings from interviews with U.S.-based mental health professionals (n = 48) working on teletherapy platforms. These therapists describe navigating both the presence of platformic controls and the absence of features supporting professional best practices and regulatory requirements. We describe this absence as the “empty shell” characteristic of platforms and argue that it is a central technique through which platforms create scale. Our findings detail the communicative strategies therapists employ to navigate the empty shell and provide quality care to their clients. These strategies can be seen as a form of “articulation work,” a concept drawn from the sociology of work. Attending to articulation work in an emerging platform labor context, such as teletherapy, contributes to our understanding of the politics of platforms. 

Abstract Online innovation competitions are ecosystems where institutions source numerous solutions from knowledge workers through a platform intermediary. By considering how an individual competitor’s performance varies based on their social positioning in a competition ecosystem’s collaboration network, we illustrate the value of social networks for individual outcomes in online competitions. The study reports results from Kaggle, a popular online competition platform for data science, where a sample of 350,956 users participated in 2,789 competitions over 4 years. We investigate how the number of collaborations, membership in the largest connected component in the network, and diversity of collaboration experiences impact the points and medals earned and how quickly competitors earn their first medal. Results show that positioning has a positive relationship with performance in competitive ecosystems. Relevant to the future of work, the study considers how knowledge workers in future workplaces should manage their online collaborations. 

Abstract The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We report three cases that offer examples of dubious, selective, and ambiguous signaling in the activities of workers seeking to shape the meaning of data within the practice of analytics. The analysis casts the future of work as a game of strategic moves between organizations, seeking to measure behaviors and quantify the performance of work, and workers, altering their behavioral signaling to meet situated goals. The framework developed offers a guide for future examinations of the asymmetric relationship between management and workers as organizations adopt metrics to monitor and evaluate work. 

Abstract Shifts to hybrid work prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to substantially impact social relationships at work. Hybrid employees rely heavily on digital collaboration technologies to communicate and share information. Therefore, employees’ perceptions of the technologies are critical in shaping organizational networks. However, the dyadic-level misalignment in these perceptions may lead to relationship dissolution. To explore the social network consequences of hybrid work, we conducted a two-wave survey in a department of an industrial manufacturing firm (N = 169). Our results show that advice seekers were less likely to maintain their advice-seeking ties when they had a mismatch in ease-of-use perceptions of technology with their advisors. The effect was more substantial when advice seekers spent more time working remotely. The study provides empirical insights into how congruence in employees’ perceptions of organizational communication technologies affects how they maintain advice networks during hybrid work.