Over the last decade, the business world has experienced abrupt changes due to the irruption of the platform economy. E-commerce giants and application-based business models have become key spaces in the economy, facilitating consumption in terms of convenience, immediacy, and availability. However, these new ways of organizing services, while easing the consumer experience, have controversial effects on the organization of work. This article provides a critical reflection on the newly emerging jobs in the platform economy sector. It will highlight the importance of the imaginary of consumption as a key enabler of these changes in employment.

Airbnb is the most valuable tourism company in history and an epitome of the platform economy in tourism. Since 2020, together with the entire tourism sector, it has experienced the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper presents the context for the current international research on Airbnb by describing the origin, current state, and possible developments of the platform offer during and after the pandemic. The data on the global Airbnb offer in 2018, 2019, and 2020 comes from web-scraping the platform website. It shows that the dynamic growth of accommodation supply stopped in the last year. The platform offer has continued to disperse geographically towards less saturated markets and rural areas during the pandemic period. Entire flats and apartments have been continuously growing in dominance in the structure of the listing, while the slower growth in the percentage of multihosts’ listings indicates a slowdown in the process of the professionalisation of the platform offer.

The sector of urban passenger transport with tourism vehicles (taxis and vehicles for hire) is, surely, the one where the appearance of the sharing economy –or, we can choose to say, the digital platforms– has given rise to more heated controversies, more questionable regulatory measures and a greater number of disputes. In the work presented herein, a brief review is set out of the latest regulatory issues which have been outlined here, highlighting those which are still awaiting resolution, in a sense which is seemingly not easy to perceive.

The regulation of work has been built on a dependent/self-employed dichotomy, which is being overcome by the development of new forms of employment. Among these, those linked to new economic models, such as the collaborative economy, are becoming very relevant. In these forms of work people provide services with an economic value, but outside traditional markets and contractual schemes. These provisions of services find a faulty fit in this binary model, demanding their own regulatory framework. The objective of this work is to define this problem, and to propose some alternatives to solve it.

The evolution towards the network company and the resulting fragmentation of work increases the number of self-employed persons with intermittent relationships between various employers and with their potential co-workers. In this context, «collectives of the self-employed» emerge in contrast to the narrative that self-employed workers are isolated from each other. These collectives organise fights against algorithms, fights for labour rights, pool material and digital resources and even present themselves to the market under a unified brand without being a company. As emerging forms of organisation, they face challenges regarding their recognition as actors in social dialogue and are even accused of acting as cartels under the prism of free competition. Although their current forms are probably not the definitive forms, we can intuit that the «collectives of the self-employed» have and will have a relevant role in defining the ways of working and living in the future.

Platforms such as Glovo, Deliveroo and Uber Eats that operate in the field of food delivery have set up in cities all around the world. The expansion of these platforms has had an impact on workers’ rights in what is considered as platform capitalism. Even then, democratic alternatives connected to the social and solidarity economy and digital commons exist. This article analyses the democratic qualities of four alternative food delivery platforms with headquarters in Europe (CoopCycle, CILFé, Crow and Mensakas). On the one hand, the results show that these platforms consider their workers’ rights; that is the main reason why they form an alternative to platform capitalism. On the other hand, the analysis shows that these platforms face important challenges, especially regarding their economic sustainability and scalability.

Although those structures that we now call platforms have always been present in some sectors, it is from the establishment of the digital economy that they have come to play a leading role in our lives. Without understanding the mechanisms that govern the dynamics of digital platforms, which are different from those associated with the more traditional economy, it is difficult to understand many aspects of how today’s economy works. The objective of this article is to offer an introduction to the idea of platform and its characteristics. First, we review the general platform concept, the specificities of digital platforms and the particularities of their operation. Second, we describe the characteristics of the platforms that we consider more relevant in order to understand their social and economic effects. Finally, we choose three of these characteristics (the degree of digitisation, the openness in terms of access, provision, use and distribution, and their governance mechanisms) to develop a proposal for the classification of the platforms that we intend as a help to organise a little better our conception of the phenomenon. The classification scheme leads to the definition of different types of platforms that behave differently, as shown by the examples that we identify for each of them. We hope that our analysis will contribute to a better understanding of the paradigm shift brought about by the digitisation of the economy.

In this article, we present a brief survey of employment via microtasks platforms. The main issues we review are the following: the economic rationale of these platforms; the estimation of the level of this type of employment; and the profile and working conditions of these workers. We close the article with a discussion of social challenges in this new type of employment.

Tourism is one of the main areas where the sharing economy is expanding. The increasing number of press and journal articles on the topic highlights the relevance – on various levels – of platforms such as Airbnb, Uber or BlaBlaCar. This paper will tackle different aspects of this subject. First, the notion of the sharing economy or collaborative consumption will be defined, examining both its initial definitions that addressed the possibility of a new economic paradigm and more recent descriptions looking at the commercial aspects and the particularities introduced by the use of major technological platforms. The focus then moves on to three aspects that shed light on convergences between sharing economy and tourism: the use of information and communication technologies, the role of references or qualifications, and the disruption of preexisting models. Finally, the conclusions from the study are drawn.