The economic geography of the gig economy in Indonesia

Permana, Muhammad Yorga (2024) The economic geography of the gig economy in Indonesia. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the economic geography of the gig economy in Indonesia, with the focus on the interplay between workers in the gig economy and their surrounding physical spaces. Although digital platforms have challenged traditional geographic work boundaries, as gig workers continue to operate within physical spaces and set up their work on the ground, this research emphasizes the importance of geography and the spatial context in understanding the gig economy. This thesis contributes to economic geography literature through two main themes. Firstly, it bridges literature on labour agency, platform control, and regional embeddedness. It proposes a robust framework on how gig workers employ various forms of labour agency in physical spaces to improve their working conditions. This research also exposes the dual role of the platform in shaping and constraining labour agency and demonstrates how different forms of agency may have varying effects on their earnings. Additionally, this thesis reintroduces the term "regional embeddedness" to link the labour agency of gig workers with urban studies literature. Despite the remote nature of their work, online gig workers anchor their labour agency to the cities where they live by utilizing multiple locations of workplaces, actively seeking local buzz in communities, and acting as local entrepreneurs to expand their gig services. Secondly, this thesis highlights the urban-centric nature of the gig economy, emphasizing how both location-based and online gig workers gain benefits from urban agglomeration. For location-based gig workers, neighborhood-based communities serve as spaces for constructing collective spatial fixes. On one hand, they may function as coping spaces where individuals engage in social activities to offer mutual support. Conversely, they may serve as transformative spaces that foster a collective consciousness and cultivate a sense of 'community of struggle'. In macro perspective, this thesis emphasizes the significance of intra-urban scale agglomeration in explaining income differences across location-based gig workers. Meanwhile, for online gig workers, factors such as the strong social connections, the reliability and accessibility of urban amenities, the vibrant urban atmosphere, and the reputation of creative cities may explain the unequal distribution of workers across cities. This suggests that the presence of platform-based work is not uniformly translated into equal opportunities across spaces. The thesis consists of a systematic literature review (Chapter 2), three empirical essays (Chapter 3, 4, and 5), and concluding remarks (Chapter 6). Each essay functions as an independent study with different research questions and distinct novelties to specific literature in economic geography. The systematic review aims to understand comprehensively the role of geography in the 6 existing literature of the gig economy. It is found that discussions on spaces and geography extend beyond dedicated geography and urban studies journals and spread across broader literature. Studies incorporating geographical discourse are mapped into three main clusters: (1) the role of physical space in the absence of workplace, (2) the spatial implication of the presence of the gig economy platform, and (3) Collective actions and regulating the gig economy. The first essay explores how income variation across gig drivers working in the gig economy can be explained by workplace location choice and attitudes related to their labour agency. By utilizing survey data from a large sample of gig drivers in Jakarta, this essay found the presence of workplace location premium: drivers who choose to work in areas with concentrated economic activities earn higher payoffs compared to those who stay in less agglomerated areas. This essay also reveals three dimensions of attitudes that matter in explaining income differences. High level of ‘tacit knowledge and driving skills’ tend to increase driver’s income. On the other hand, attitudes related to ‘reliance on technology and the platform’ and ‘social networks’ negatively affect the income. The second essay explores how gig drivers exercised labour agency to improve their working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a survey and in-depth interviews with gig drivers in Jakarta, it contributes to the literature by reconceptualizing typology of labour agency in the gig economy based on two main categories: (1) whether the agency aims to transform the system or to cope with the current reality, and (2) whether the agency is undertaken individually or collectively. This essay further presents main obstacles that explain why not all workers may exercise these practices. Finally, it argues that external forces such as pandemic shock, local labour market conditions, and platform control should be considered as factors that shaping and limiting labour agency. It demonstrates that workers in the gig economy are embedded into socio-economic, cultural, and geographical contexts. The third essay investigates how online gig workers embed into the local context to reap the benefit of urban agglomeration. In the absence of a traditional workplace, workers tend to develop a continuous process of becoming part of the city. By drawing on interviews with online gig workers in five secondary cities in Indonesia, this essay structures the notion of regional embeddedness into three main mechanisms. First, workers organize remote tasks ‘on the ground’ by utilizing multiple locations of workplaces. Second, they actively cultivate face-to-face interactions within their social networks for exchanging knowledge and sharing similar identity. Finally, they operate as micro-entrepreneurs who leverage urban density as a business ecosystem to scale up their services.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Muhammad Yorga Permana
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Crescenzi, Riccardo and Holman, Nancy
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4735

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