‘Freelancers must be able to put up with all types of clients’: Affective labour and precarious subjectivities in remote platform work

Abstract

While the gig economy is widely associated with increasing precariousness, previous studies have mostly focused on structural working conditions rather than diverse subjective experiences, treating platform work as a homogenous phenomenon. However, what gig work means for workers varies widely, depending on local contexts and types of work. In this paper, I draw on concepts of affective labour and intersectionality to study the everyday practices of freelance designers who are based in India and connect to overseas clients via digital freelance platforms. Using methods from digital ethnography, I ask: How do remote freelancers negotiate dimensions of difference as they work on forging connections with clients through digital platforms? I find that digital freelancers negotiate intersectional identities as they relate to others, adapting what they share about themselves online. Being ‘Indian’ emerges as a central but ambiguous dimension of social difference, which is negotiated along the lines of five axes of differentiation: work ethic and skill, economic value, language, time and visuality and aesthetics. By tracing how affective labour is part of processes of subjectification and differentiation, I aim to contribute to intersectional, process-based perspectives on precarious platform-mediated work.

Keywords

platform work precariousness affective labour intersectionality India digital ethnography gig economy

Introduction: Navigating precariousness in the gig economy

‘I think [clients will approach me again] if they’re comfortable with me, working with me, they have good communication with me, they really like my work, they really like my thought process, which I try to explain a lot. [. . .] So that it builds trust and communication. And, I think, making the client feel like this is a safe design space and to basically trust me as a designer’ (Interview with Ankit, 01-03-20).¹

In this quote, Ankit, a graphic designer based in Pune, India, describes how he interacts with clients on 99designs, an online platform through which he earns much of his income. He regularly participates in design contests on the platform to create logos or brochure designs, for example. Both his clients and his competitors are spread across the globe, albeit in uneven ways: work relations in the remote gig economy are still predominantly formed between clients from high-income countries and workers from low-income countries (ILO, 2021: 53). As part of the gig economy, Ankit’s everyday work practices are characterised by uncertainty and volatility – he is only paid if he wins a contest. He spends a considerable portion of his workday sorting through briefs and pondering which ones bear promising combinations of realistic chances to win and a remuneration that would be worth his time. When he is awarded a contract, he performs additional unpaid work, extensively sharing his thought process and ensuring that clients perceive him as trustworthy and pleasant to work with. He expects this to increase his chances of getting good reviews and to have clients keep him in mind for follow-up projects.

I argue in this paper that the precariousness of gig work requires workers to perform affective labour to continuously convince clients to start or continue working with them. 99designs, for example, promises users to ‘find you a designer you’ll love’² – but what does it take for workers to be a ‘lovable designer’ and to forge a connection with a client through digital means? And do all clients love the same type of designer?

While gig work has been studied extensively as an instance of increasing precarisation of work (cf. e.g. Altenried, 2021; Friedman, 2014; Ravenelle, 2019), gig workers’ subjective experiences and practices of navigating precariousness have received relatively little scholarly attention so far (with some notable exceptions, cf. e.g. Ravenelle, 2019). Empirically, I focus on creative work performed remotely via freelance platforms, which is relatively understudied (with some notable exceptions, e.g. Ettlinger, 2017; Graham et al., 2017; Shevchuk et al., 2021). For remote freelancers who perform complex tasks, such as design work, there is potential for some degree of a personal connection and continuity with the same client, which sets them apart from delivery riders, for example. However, the gig economy is still geared towards treating workers as a disposable resource.

As work is organised in the form of single gigs, with a considerable oversupply of labour on most platforms (ILO, 2021: 50), freelancers continuously invest a lot of time and effort in preparing the ground for gigs. I have previously described the continuous effort to make and sustain connections in a highly uncertain and volatile work environment as four ‘practices of assembling’: guessing and anticipating, adapting to constant change, creating momentary alignment and producing relatable selves (Oechslen, 2023). These practices reflect work’s opacity, contingency and volatility in a platform-mediated work environment. In this paper, I focus especially on practices of producing relatable selves as a lens to understand how social categories of difference emerge from everyday interactions between freelancers and clients.

Digital freelance platforms often employ an image of providing the opportunity to access a global labour market and leave behind many of the constraints of the offline world, from geographical location to physical ability: 99designs, for example, states that ‘Design doesn’t do borders’ and that ‘every designer, from Sydney to Serbia, can be successful on our platform’.³ Similarly, the 2013 annual impact report of the freelance platform Elance⁴ features the story of a worker who had trouble finding employment because of his physical disability and then started to work successfully through the platform.⁵

While academic research on intersectional differences in the gig economy is scarce, existing studies suggest that social categories of difference continue to stratify workers’ experiences. Milkman et al. (2021) study the intersection of gender and class for white working-class women in platform-based food delivery, and Popan and Anaya-Boig (2022) shed light on the experiences of cycle food couriers, arguing that the experience of precarity in this field is intersectional, as ‘issues of gender, race and migration status further impact on what it means to be precarious’ (Popan and Anaya-Boig, 2022: 36). Bridging various forms of platform work, including remote freelancing, Sannon and Cosley (2022) centre disability as a dimension of difference and carve out how disability interacts with race, class and gender. They also point out how gig workers perform additional invisible and unpaid labour to mitigate the negative influence of these categories. These studies contribute important differentiations to research on platform work, but they approach dimensions of inequality as fixed categories that affect workers’ experiences.

To bring together affective labour and the production of difference, I pose the following research question: How do remote freelancers negotiate dimensions of difference as they work on forging connections with clients through digital platforms? With the findings of this paper, I intend to contribute to intersectional, process-based perspectives on precarious platform-mediated work. I engage with the growing literature on subjective experiences of precariousness (cf. e.g. Armano et al., 2017; Choonara et al., 2022; Peticca-Harris et al., 2020) by foregrounding everyday practices of managing uncertainty. By incorporating platforms as meaningful actors in online freelancers’ everyday work practices, I address how the digitalisation of work has contributed to embodied experiences of precariousness. I highlight how precariousness is existential, embodied, and entangled with relational aspects of life beyond paid work by integrating unpaid affective labour into my analysis of platform work.

The remainder of this paper is divided into five sections: First, I lay out the conceptual framework, developing the argument that affective labour is part of processes of subjectification and differentiation. Second, I outline my research design and methodological approach, drawing on tools of digital ethnography. Third, I present the findings of my study. I explore the unpaid affective labour performed by remote platform workers based in India as they navigate a highly uncertain working environment. Moreover, I trace how categories of difference are negotiated along the lines of five dimensions of difference: work ethic and skill, economic value, language, time, and visuality and aesthetics. In doing so, I focus on how freelancers’ physical location in India comes into play as they interact with clients, asking how discourses on ‘cheap labour’, for example, are reproduced in a globalised digital labour market. Fourth, I discuss these findings and, finally, I point out their implications for and contributions to theoretical perspectives on intersectionality and precarious subjectivities.

Doing difference with affective labour

Affective labour and subjectification

Precarious workers are called upon to be ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ (Foucault, 2008) – they are required to be ‘masters of their own destiny’ (Bove et al., 2017: 4) and invest in their own ‘human capital’ (cf. Feher, 2009). Dealing with precariousness, then, requires a lot of unpaid and often unrecognised work. I argue here that foregrounding this work in the form of affective labour can contribute to a better understanding of the multiple subjective experiences of precariousness. Moreover, I argue that affective labour is a helpful lens to study how differences are produced, as affective labour is also tied to subjectification processes.

Coined by Hardt (1999), affective labour broadly refers to the effort of producing and manipulating affect through one’s behaviour. As Fotaki et al. (2017) argue, affect theory holds potential for organisation studies on a theoretical, methodological, and critical level. The term departs from the notion of a bounded, authentic subject. Instead, affect is associated with a notion of ‘becoming’, that is,

‘an open-ended process that is not in pursuit of the fixed or predefined positions that are privileged in dualist ontologies; it dispenses with an individualized, finite and separate notion of the subject. In adopting such a non-teleological position, the authors call for retheorizing subjectivity as always being in connection and in flux rather than in opposition to the other’ (Fotaki et al., 2017: 12).

Accordingly, affective labour, too, includes a notion of subjectification, that is, working subjects are produced through affective labour practices (Mankekar and Gupta, 2016: 26–27). Furthermore, affect entails a relational perspective, perceiving people as interdependent: it ‘places people in a co-subjective circuit of feeling and sensation, rather than standing alone and independent’ (Fotaki et al., 2017: 4). This makes affect a useful lens for studying how subjectivities emerge from relationships. Getting emotions across remotely requires specific practices of emotion work and affective labour, as Mankekar and Gupta (2016) have argued based on their study on business process outsourcing (BPO) call centre workers in Bengaluru. They contend that as ‘affective labor depends on interaction, the “output” is always uncertain, even less than the worker’s control over a product being made on an assembly line’ (Mankekar and Gupta, 2016: 28).

I have previously described how freelance workers in the gig economy perform unpaid work to make and sustain connections with current and prospective clients (Oechslen, 2023). Part of this work is ‘producing relatable selves’, that is, adapting to clients’ anticipated needs to appear trustworthy and likeable. As freelancers navigate precariousness by working on making and sustaining connections, they also negotiate their identities. In the volatile work environment of the platform economy, they produce fleeting subjectivities adapted to different clients, in the hopes of convincing them to work with them (Oechslen, 2023: 175–177). Building on the notion of producing relatable selves, in this paper, I argue that tracing processes of subjectification associated with affective labour can also shed light on intersectional difference.

Intersectional perspectives: Fluid and relational dimensions of difference

Especially a strand of research that explores how privileges and disadvantages are embodied and relationally constructed (e.g. Alberti and Iannuzzi, 2020; Atewologun et al., 2016; Johansson and Śliwa, 2016; Mirza, 2013) can be valuable to address the research question of this paper. Atewologun et al. (2016) introduce the notion of ‘identity work’ for the effort workers put into making sense of everyday events, and to maintain self-esteem and a sense of coherence as they relate to different people in their everyday work. They argue that identity and impression management tactics are necessary for professional self-presentation, showing how British Asian and Black women and men negotiate their identities situationally as they interact with subordinates, superiors and clients. Also using identity work as a lens, Luiz and Terziev (2024) find in their study on LGBT mid-level managers in South Africa that the axes of race, gender and sexuality are fluid and situationally specific in work interactions, with different identity dimensions becoming relevant depending on who participants faced.

Alberti and Iannuzzi (2020) focus on embodied intersectionality in the interactions between service staff and guests in Italian hotels, understanding ‘gender and other dimensions of difference as social practices and organizing principles that operate in a fluid and relational manner’ (p. 1168). They extend the range of categories of difference based on their observations, also considering educational background, for example. Johansson and Śliwa (2016) put a similar approach to practice as they investigate how language intersects with categories such as gender, class and nationality in processes of social differentiation for Polish migrants in the UK. These perspectives on intersectional inequalities in organisations stress the processual and relational character of categories of difference. However, while most scholars acknowledge that identities are socially constructed, they are usually still treated as pre-existing categories.

On a more general level, Dhamoon (2011) presents focusing on processes as a potential way of mainstreaming intersectionality. She proposes a ‘matrix of meaning-making’ to foreground the dynamic character of producing difference:

‘Compared to the other models that tend to suggest that clearly defined boundaries exist between different identities and categories, the image used to represent a matrix of meaning-making reflects the shifting fusions of multilayered and relational differences’ (Dhamoon, 2011: 238).

Instead of treating categories such as gender or race as personal attributes, she centres processes of gendering and racialisation, for example, as processes in which subjectivities and social differences are produced.

Taking up this relational and processual perspective on intersectionality, I foreground processes of producing categories of difference in everyday work practices here. I aim to develop dimensions of difference from my research material rather than approaching it with pre-formed categories to discover emic, and potentially surprising, axes of intersectionality (cf. Healy et al., 2019: 1755). I use the concept of affective labour to bring perspectives on precariousness and intersectionality into dialogue. By carving out how affective labour is part of processes of subjectification and differentiation, I aim to contribute to relational and processual perspectives on intersectionality. That is, rather than treating categories of difference as personal attributes, I will trace practices of affective labour along the lines of several axes of differentiation.

I start from the assumption that work ‘is organized on the model of the unencumbered (white) man’ (Acker, 2006: 449–450) and that inequality is negotiated as positions are navigated in relation to this default worker. However, in this paper, I will focus especially on processes of differentiation rather than inequality.

Research approach: Tracing practices with digital ethnography

To address the research question of this paper, I worked with a combination of methods under the umbrella of digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016). In doing so, I used a ‘non-digital centric approach to the digital’ (Pink et al., 2016: 7), that is, I aimed to understand practices of engaging with digital media rather than digital media themselves. This approach corresponds with the goal to address embodied inequalities in a digitally mediated field: By combining digital methods with face-to-face interviews, I traced how subjectivities are negotiated in embodied and digitally mediated practices, beyond a notion of ‘online identities’, in congruence with Hine’s argument that

‘there is in contemporary Internet usage often a considerable degree of recognizable continuity between one’s online and offline experiences and identities and, in fact, one’s performance on social networking sites may often be judged according to whether it is authentic rather than “fake”, comparing the online self directly with its offline counterpart’ (Hine, 2015: 41).

This article draws from research I did for my PhD thesis on remote freelancers’ everyday practices of making and sustaining connections in a platform-mediated work environment (Oechslen, 2023). I conducted fieldwork in three main phases between January 2019 and May 2021, comprising online explorations, interviews and digital photo diaries. Ethnographic research entails combining methods to bring to light different aspects of a phenomenon, and adapting the approach to what the research process reveals (Hine, 2015: 176–177). Accordingly, while I brought my own frames of reference and concepts to the table, I aimed to remain flexible and open to being surprised by the meanings that research participants ascribed to their situations and built the range of methods during my research process. In terms of methodology, I aimed to reflect this adaptability by iteratively switching between gathering and analysing material, using tools from grounded theory methodology (Strauss and Corbin, 2003).

I focused on freelance graphic designers’ practices in my study, first, as the product of their work is easily transmittable online and does not strongly depend on language. Accordingly, tasks such as designing logos are commonly mediated by online platforms. Second, design is a complex task which requires specialised knowledge. By contrast to so-called microtasks, these types of jobs have received little attention in the literature on platform work so far. Moreover, I expected the need for unpaid work connected to standing out to clients, making emotional connections, and curating one’s profile to be stronger in this type of work than with more standardised tasks. Thus, creative freelance work promised to be a good example for the practices I am interested in. Geographically, I delimited the scope of my research to freelancers based in India. The country was the largest provider of remote platform-mediated work in the world in 2020 (ILO, 2021: 53), followed by Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In the first research phase, from January 2019 to October 2019, I explored the platform-mediated work environment from the vantage point of online platforms. I chose four platforms for closer investigation, 99designs, Fiverr, Talenthouse and Upwork, aiming to contrast them along several dimensions. All four platforms target a global clientele and mediate design jobs. I differentiated them by whether they are focused on design specifically or mediate a wide range of tasks. Within these categories, I chose platforms that differ from each other in their specific focus to cover a broad spectrum of user practices. I conducted walkthroughs (Light et al., 2017) of the four platforms I had selected for in-depth analysis, looked at clients’ and freelancers’ profiles, as well as forum threads and blog posts within the framework of the platforms, without actively engaging with platform users.

Based on the understanding of how platforms frame and structure interaction I had gained through walkthroughs of four digital freelance platforms, I set out to get more insights into freelancers’ everyday practices and experiences. I conducted 12 semi-structured interviews, which lasted between 45 and 90 minutes, with freelance designers who regularly use online freelance platforms to connect to clients. Most of the interviews took place during my month-long field stay in Bengaluru between February and March 2020; moreover, I conducted one pilot interview in advance and four further interviews via video call until March 2021. All interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis.

I contacted respondents through their social media profiles or via direct messages on Upwork and 99designs. I loosely structured the interviews along three themes: freelancers reflected on how they organise their everyday work, curate their profiles and interact with clients and other platform workers. With some research participants, I combined the verbal accounts of their experiences with visual representations of how they curate their profiles. During in-person interviews, when the research participants’ time and the setting allowed for it, I opened their platform profile on my laptop. I then asked them to guide me through their profile, point out the most relevant features and reflect on how they reworked different elements in their profile over time.

To go deeper into the affective dimension of freelancers’ work and to add a visual layer to the material, I chose digital photo diaries by freelancers as a third approach. This final method served to probe and refine my observations, and to allow more space for freelancers’ reflections on their work. Between February and May 2021, I sent seven photo prompts and short questionnaires each to five freelancers who regularly find work through digital platforms. In addition, one freelancer provided written accounts without sending photos. Diaries have been used as a research method for a long time (e.g. Zimmerman and Wieder, 1977) and have been adapted to capture experiences of digital media in the everyday (e.g. Hjorth and Richardson, 2020). They allow the researcher to indirectly participate in everyday practices while giving research participants the space to provide their interpretations and reflections. Clark (2021) further adapted the diary method by combining photo prompts with short questionnaires, arguing that pictures can capture affective and mundane elements of daily life and make it easy to include non-human agents, such as the built environment.⁶ With the photo diaries, I aimed to integrate platform workers’ routines and practices of making and sustaining connections with the affordances and constraints the platforms provided. The diaries covered research participants’ workspaces, their daily rituals, their different responsibilities and relationships beyond platform work, their relationships with their clients, the emotions they connect with their work and what they consider the value of their work.

For this paper, I focus mainly on the data that emerged from 12 interviews with platform workers based in India and photo diaries produced by five platform workers. Each method I used shed light on different aspects of the research question: The online explorations in the beginning served as a foundation to carve out the role digital platforms played in interactions. Interviews provided insights into freelancers’ perspectives on their everyday work practices, addressing progressively focused questions throughout the study and digital photo diaries added further insights into affective dimensions of work.

Finding research participants in the field of remote platform work is often a challenge, as this work is usually done out of private homes and there is little connection between workers. A limitation that is especially relevant for the focus of this paper is that the sample of the study is not equally distributed concerning gender, with only one participant out of 12 gig worker interviewees, Jiya, identifying as female and all others identifying as male. Equally, Jiya was the only woman who produced a digital photo diary. Consequently, although I expect gender to be a relevant category of difference, I can only make limited statements about its role based on my research material. My sample does not reflect the general population of online freelancers in this regard, which comprises around 41% women, according to an ILO report, with lower numbers in ‘developing countries’, however (ILO, 2021: 138). While I approached several women for interviews, I only got a positive response from Jiya. This might be because women may have been more hesitant to meet up with a stranger. Moreover, travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic meant that I could only conduct part of my research physically co-present with research participants. As a result, I had to rely on research participants’ accounts and reflections on embodied inequalities. Participant observation, for example, might add further dimensions to the results of this paper.

I used the software MAXQDA as a tool for managing and analysing the diverse types of material: I collected screenshots from online platforms, interview transcripts and participants’ digital photo diaries in the programme and marked them with codes, from which I proceeded to build overarching categories through open, axial, and selective coding (Strauss and Corbin, 2003). For this paper, I started from the categories ‘Management of Emotions’ and ‘Negotiation of Value’, which had emerged as central to freelancers’ everyday practices from abductive coding of the material I had gathered. These categories are connected: the perceived value of freelancers’ work is closely associated with how well they manage to evoke positive emotions like trust in prospective and current clients. I then went through the digital photo diaries and interviews with gig workers again to code for ‘identity work’, ‘inequality regimes’ and ‘axes of differentiation’ and related them to the existing categories. The following section reflects the main themes resulting from this analysis: five axes of differentiation embedded in practices of affective labour.

Making platform workers: Axes of differentiation

As I have established above, in performing affective labour, workers negotiate their identities in relation to others. In this section, I use the lens of affective labour to explore how workers’ physical location in India comes to matter in a digital work environment along the lines of five overlapping axes of differentiation: work ethic and skill, economic value, language, time and visuality and aesthetics. As they interact with clients, workers’ subject positions are simultaneously related to a global labour market and anchored in their immediate physical surroundings. This is not to suggest there were coherent cultural attributes essentially associated with ‘Indianness’; instead, they are produced in relation to others as assumptions about oneself and the other are negotiated.

Work ethic and skill

First, for freelancers, disclosing their physical location is associated with assumptions about their work ethic and skill. Freelancers are often ascribed certain characteristics according to their national context: Arnav, for example, reports that he has come across job postings that explicitly excluded Indians:

‘It depends on what kind of people you have met in your past. [. . .] And what kind of experience you have from them. [. . .] You see on Upwork, they say “Indians, please do not bid”. [. . .] So, it is like they have a bad experience or similar, it is just like that’ (Interview with Arnav, 09-03-20).

He associates people’s negative image not with racism but with negative experiences they made in the past. Similarly, Sarabjit echoes the negative connotation of Indian designers, but distances himself from them:

‘Sometimes, clients don’t want designers from India. Because, they are submitting any kind of design. Sometimes [Indian] designers don’t show any level of design. They just work after downloading some stock images and, so maybe this is the reason some clients don’t want designers from India. But if the client is working with me, the experience has been always good’ (Interview with Sarabjit, 09-03-20).

At the same time, designers also ascribe certain attributes to India as a national context when describing their work: Ankit, for example, explains:

‘They do not value design as much as people do abroad [. . .]. I don’t think they understand the full impact of it. I guess because India, it’s a lot more chaotic and it’s a lot more fast-moving (laughs), so, I guess they don’t value the impact of for example a logo. But I’ve realised, foreign clients really care about these things, they understand the impact that that’s going to have on their company’ (Interview with Ankit, 01-03-20).

He thus also devalues the design scene in India, while, like Sarabjit and Arnav, counting himself out of the category he refers to.

However, being associated with ‘Indianness’ can also spark positive associations, depending on who a freelancer is dealing with. Jiya, for example, has been hired by a Canadian client to create the package design for a line of ayurvedic cosmetics they sell in a spa. She reflects:

‘They have ayurvedic products, [and] we can design according to that. Because we have some understanding because it’s an Indian thing. We know which colour to use [. . .] with whatever is used in the products’ (Interview with Jiya, 08-03-20).

As they grapple with assumptions about Indian work and design culture, freelancers also navigate their own images of themselves. Being ‘Indian’ is filled with various meanings for freelancers working out of India, depending on who they relate to and what attributes are ascribed to them. They often accept and reproduce the verdict at a collective level, while at the same time excluding themselves from the definition or selectively opting in when positive qualities are associated with ‘Indianness’. As they connect to clients, freelancers oscillate between showcasing how professional they are – which is often associated with closeness to a white male default worker (cf. Acker, 2006: 449–450) and stressing certain attributes of Indianness that they expect to evoke positive associations, such as designing for ayurvedic products or yoga studios.

Economic value

Second, workers negotiate the value of their services along economic lines. Freelancers reported that their work was perceived as less valuable because they are located in South Asia. Jiya, for example, describes it as a ‘hard truth’ that clients from the Global North will pay her less for her work: ‘That is one of the reasons why they are in that platform. Otherwise, obviously they can find a local designer and do it at their local price’ (Follow-up interview with Jiya, 23-02-21). Similarly, Sarabjit reflects that ‘people outside of India think that we Indians are cheap labour’ (Interview with Sarabjit, 09-03-20). However, compared to the local projects that many also work on, platform work often still earns them higher rates. Ankit, for example, compares:

‘Online, I just work on 99designs primarily and I take local projects. But the thing about local projects is that they don’t pay as well as online platforms. I mean it’s just because I’m in India. Because the clients that come on these websites find it a lot cheaper than their local talent. [. . .] but for me it works out because what they pay locally is less than what I would get on an online platform’ (Interview with Ankit, 01-03-20).

He sets his income in relation to clients who find his work cheaper than what they would have to pay for someone in their own country, thus placing himself in the context of labour arbitrage. Simultaneously, he relates his income from remote platform work to what he could earn for a comparable project locally; in this case he is in a superior position working for overseas clients through an online platform. Other freelancers reported that local clients were prepared to pay even less for their services when they approached them via platforms. Being located in India, here, is not neutral but brings with it assumptions about what an acceptable rate for a service would be.

These connections are not just bilateral: freelancers also categorise others based on their location. While I have focused on their positions as freelancers providing a service here, some designers also buy services from others via the same platform, for example, to subcontract elements of a design job they are providing. Ishaan, for instance, operates through Upwork with a small design agency he has set up with two colleagues. Having established himself on the platform, he has now moved on to a more managerial role: he regularly receives big and complex orders from a US client and subcontracts the actual design work to around eight further designers. He explains: ‘Most of the graphic designers are from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines – countries which have lower cost of living than India’ (Interview with Ishaan, 11-03-20). Moreover, they sometimes collaborate with other freelancers on projects, with relationships ranging from minimal communication to venting about a client together.

In negotiating the rates for their services, freelancers grapple with stereotypes about ‘cheap labour’ while also differentiating themselves from the local labour market and workers in other regions. Their ‘Indianness’ takes on different meanings, depending on who they relate to. What is more, affective labour also takes on an economic dimension as being perceived as ‘nice to work with’ can convince clients to hire a freelancer for further projects. They are service providers, and making their clients happy extends to the experience they create for them. As Divyansh explains from his experience as a freelance filmmaker:

‘I’m very casual that way, so it doesn’t feel like work for them. I make their work easy. So, people who are like that, I don’t think they would need anybody else to do my job, you know. Because I make sure it’s more fun than work’ (Interview with Divyansh, 27-02-20).

In this sense, freelancers perform affective labour to create a positive experience of working together. They go to great lengths to keep their clients happy and sustain positive relationships with them.

Language

Third, India as a physical location entails a language dimension. Even though the services provided by the freelancers in this study are not directly associated with language, understanding subtle differences in clients’ instructions affects how they can implement their design vision.

Precise cover letters that hit the right tone are an important tool for standing out to prospective clients and building trust: Instead of writing generic applications, they refer explicitly to what a client has mentioned in the design brief and explain how their qualifications match the job requirements. Freelancers go through a learning process when they start on the platform, where they first write a lot of generic cover letters, which mostly get rejected, and, learning from their experiences, start taking more time for a single cover letter. Moreover, sharing one’s thought process is an important aspect of gaining clients’ trust and ‘creating a safe design space’, as Ankit’s quote in the beginning has illustrated.

While all the freelancers I interviewed have English skills that allow them to communicate clearly, speaking English as a second language and not knowing some of the cultural codes is sometimes read as a lack of professionalism (cf. Oechslen, 2020). This is reflected in a forum entry on Fiverr, for example:

‘Those of you who use “dear”, and you’re most likely from the Indian subcontinent. This is a cultural thing that nobody else does. You sound weird and creepy when you do it. I know you’re trying to show respect, but that is not how it seems in English. Don’t do it (this is incredibly difficult to explain since I don’t fully understand it – if an Indian would like to help out that would be great!) Aside from improving your English and working within the limitations of your current English, you need to know the cultural practices of global business – right now, that’s US business’ (Fiverr forum entry).

This quote illustrates, on the one hand, the predominance of English as a language and Western ideas of professionalism in the global platform labour market. On the other hand, it underlines the affective dimension of language: hitting just the right tone and finding the right words for the situation affects whether workers come across as ‘weird and creepy’ or professional and trustworthy.

At the same time, freelancers assess the tone of design briefs when they decide which jobs to apply for. Here, again, language is about more than getting facts across. Moreover, freelancers assess prospective clients’ English skills to see if communication will be smooth. While grappling with assumptions about their ability to communicate appropriately, they also communicate with others who do not speak English as a first language. Similar to the economic axis, freelancers’ subject positions are fluid: what is expected of them in communication varies with the people they are communicating with.

Time

Fourth, workers’ subjectivities are differentiated along temporal lines. As I have described above, being associated with working from India can mean that freelancers have to work extra hard to earn clients’ trust. They may have to overcome cultural differences to reassure clients and go to great lengths to show they are trustworthy. This often implies fast replies and regularly checking one’s smartphone for new messages. Freelancers usually adapt to the business hours of clients in different time zones; always replying quickly to messages to be perceived as reliable often requires them to work very early in the morning or late at night.

This intersects with the fact that most workers are not ‘unencumbered’: their lives beyond platform work come with various responsibilities and time constraints. For many, platform work is only one element of broader constellations of paid work with local freelance jobs or paid employment. Beyond this, freelance workers’ time outside of paid work is structured by further responsibilities: Jiya, for example, strictly limits the times in which she pursues her work as a freelance graphic designer because she also cares for her young son. She sets up clear boundaries for her work, both emotionally and timewise. Suveer, on the other hand, who also has a child, reports that his wife takes over tasks such as taking their child to school in the morning so that he can work at night. This leaves more room for him to establish rapport with clients. While the material collected in this study does not suffice to make conclusive statements about this, it aligns with existing studies suggesting that paid work and care responsibilities are distributed in highly gendered ways and women often use platform work to integrate different responsibilities (cf. e.g. James, 2022). Apart from having the space to do paid work, freelancers also rely on the support of others to buffer periods of peak activity. Moksh, for example, regularly gets help with design jobs from his sister. Others subcontract elements of tasks to be able to stick to a quick turnaround time.

Time is thus an axis of differentiation on several levels: as freelancers adapt to the business hours of clients in different time zones and feel the need to respond to messages quickly, their own rhythms are guided by catering to others’ needs. At the same time, a temporal axis of differentiation also produces difference among freelance workers, as they have different time capacities.

Visuality and aesthetics

Finally, freelancers’ affective labour produces differences on a visual level. Freelancers perform identity work by showcasing ‘authenticity’, which needs to be performed in different ways via an online platform than in physical co-location. In a context characterised by complexity and opacity, freelancers curate the aesthetics of their profiles to make clients feel like they are just the right person for the job. Hiring decisions are often made based on limited information on both sides. Jiya describes: ‘It’s a complete virtual thing. The client cannot see you. I cannot see the client. So, trust is very important. Your credibility is very important’ (Interview with Jiya, 08-03-20). Proving one’s authenticity online is often connected to anchoring one’s online persona in the ‘real’ world, for example, through a profile picture. As Sarabjit reflects:

‘It should look professional, and it should not look funky. Although we can do some artistic things, like upside down and all. But I don’t think Upwork will verify that [. . .] because they want a professional designer instead of a funky designer (laughs). [. . .] Keeping the photograph gives the client a personalised touch, instead of putting the logo. [. . .] Because they can find a logo on Google. [. . .] So, they are not interested in our logo. They are interested in with whom they are working’ (Interview with Sarabjit, 09-03-20).

Sarabjit’s account illustrates that choosing a professional profile picture entails adhering to shared standards, such as being serious rather than ‘funky’, on the one hand. On the other hand, it means sharing one’s face with a prospective client, that is, providing information about who is going to work for them. Thus, professional self-branding means that freelancers must balance sharing and holding back, presenting those aspects of themselves that they anticipate being relatable and reassuring to the client. Being professional, then, does not mean being emotionally neutral but connecting their profile to a person beyond the platform. The importance of being personal and relatable also hints at the emotional dimension of platform-mediated work relationships: although the process of working together is structured by the platform, it is still relevant for clients to work with a ‘real’ person. Moreover, as the quote illustrates, the platform – Upwork, in this case – plays an important role in how being professional is understood and reflected in self-branding. Apart from showing their faces, freelancers also curate the visual impressions of their workplace for video calls with clients, for example. This is reflected in practices like moving to another room from one’s usual workplace for client calls, as Janbir explains in his photo diary.

In addition to representations of themselves and the spaces they inhabit, freelancers also adapt to what they anticipate their clients’ visual style to be by paying close attention to the design brief and researching clients’ websites and social media. This practice also has a cultural component: Vikas reports that he adapts the designs he creates to the region where the client is based, choosing simpler and cleaner designs for US-based clients and more whimsical designs for Indian clients, for example (Interview with Vikas, 15-03-20).

To sum up, freelancers also use visual elements to make clients feel understood and to provide a personal touch. First, these can contribute to differentiation, as they reintroduce personal and spatial attributes that are supposed to play a lesser role in digital work. Second, cultural differences are negotiated in assumptions about visual preferences in different regions.

Discussion

In my findings, the meaning of ‘Indianness’ was negotiated between workers and clients along the lines of its implications for work ethic and skill, economic value, language, time, and visuality and aesthetics. Being a ‘designer you’ll love’ implied navigating these axes of difference, choosing the right images and words, reading between the lines and assessing whether to give off an impression of cool professionalism or local expertise. The above exploration of how freelance workers negotiate categories of difference as they connect to clients has shown three things, which I will discuss in more detail in this section: First, categories of difference associated with physical attributes and locations remain relevant in digitally mediated work. Second, these categories are multi-faceted and dynamic. Third, platform workers negotiate their positions vis-à-vis categories of difference as they produce ‘relatable selves’ (Oechslen, 2023).

I have outlined how the workers in my study negotiated their physical location in India in their interactions with clients. Coming back to the promises of the platform economy, while designers could participate in this labour market on a global scale, whether they were in Sydney or Serbia – or Bengaluru – did make a difference in their experiences and others’ perceptions of them. Categories of difference associated with physical attributes and physical locations were far from obsolete in their work. Instead, they were reproduced in everyday interactions. In addition to profile pictures, which disclose physical attributes, digital platforms also associated workers with their nationality or the physical location from which they work, by verifying their ID or checking their IP address, for example. This was visible to clients to varying degrees, depending on the platform: while 99designs left it to their users whether they want to disclose their location, clients could filter for freelancers’ locations in Upwork. Disclosing one’s physical location to prospective clients affected how workers were perceived. This runs counter to arguments that assume a digital labour market levelled the playing field for workers. Furthermore, as the time dimension of difference has shown, for example, the requirement to be perceived as reliable by catering to clients during their business hours and being continuously reachable interfered with bodily needs like getting enough sleep and taking regular breaks.

By tracing the processes of negotiating ‘Indianness’, I have also shown that categories of difference are not static and clear-cut. In my findings, nationality as a category consisted of six overlapping and dynamic dimensions, which differed according to specific situations. First, how nationality came to matter was shaped by how further elements of workers’ lives interacted with its dimensions. Workers who fell under the category of ‘Indianness’ could adapt to clients’ schedules to varying degrees depending on their other responsibilities, for example. Furthermore, whether they knew how to navigate subtle cultural codes when communicating with clients depended on whether they went to an English language school or had experience working in an international context, which was, in turn, influenced by their socio-economic background and whether they grew up in an urban or rural area. Second, even for individual workers, the dimensions of nationality played out in different ways as they connected to a range of clients and collaborators in various projects. Cultural knowledge associated with being based in India can be an advantage, as Jiya’s account of designing the packaging for Ayurvedic cosmetics has illustrated. At the same time, workers grappled with negative assumptions about their design skills and work ethic in many projects. Moreover, the attribute of ‘cheap labour’ or being in a ‘low-income country’ was not an absolute category: as workers negotiated their position vis-à-vis overseas clients and local clients in India as well as collaborators and subcontractors in further countries, the economic connotations of their physical location shifted. In short, for the freelancers in this study, ‘Indianness’ was not a clear-cut category, but dynamic and situationally specific.

Finally, as workers performed affective labour, they co-produced categories of difference. Remote freelancers in the platform economy continuously produce relatable selves (Oechslen, 2023): they anticipate and cater to what prospective clients expect from them to gain their trust and strive to be perceived as likeable. While the freelancers in this study were part of a ‘crowd’, they made sure their clients felt unique. This requires empathy, attentiveness and diligence on the freelancers’ side. The need to perform affective labour was not a singular characteristic of platform work for them. Those freelancers who also worked on local jobs reported that getting along with clients was important for them in both contexts. However, the affordances and constraints that the platform provided meant that they performed this affective labour in a challenging setting, where they had to put considerable effort into purely written communication and build trust with limited means.

Part of platform workers’ efforts to gain clients’ trust was to anticipate what they would perceive as appropriate or pleasant. As I have argued so far, what is considered appropriate or pleasant is, inter alia, shaped by preconceptions about nationality and situationally specific. While workers’ individual contexts affected their capacities to perform affective labour, their practices of affective labour also co-produced their subjectivities as Indian workers. As they tried to distance themselves and prove that they were different from other Indian workers in terms of work ethic and skill, the freelancers in this study simultaneously reproduced cultural stereotypes, as they did when they performed Indianness in situations where it may put them at an advantage. In trying to be relatable, workers perceived and produced themselves with an outside gaze. This was also reflected in the visual implementation of being professional in profile pictures, for instance. Moreover, in the words they chose as they communicated with clients, freelancers reproduced ideas about professional language: both when they were successful in assimilating their language to US- or UK-based clients and when they evoked irritation by not adhering to dominant cultural codes, as the forum entry above has illustrated.

Generally, the designers in this study were confronted with the task of evoking a feeling of security in clients in a context where it may be tough to trust someone at first, as the authenticity of one’s online persona cannot be easily verified. Against this backdrop, I argue that what is considered a ‘self that works’ (Gandini and Pais, 2020: 232) is shaped by discourses centring Northern perspectives, regarding what is considered professional, for example. Mankekar and Gupta (2016) describe how BPO call centre workers in India were ‘trained to adopt particular kinds of affective repertoires – of courtesy, familiarity, friendliness, helpfulness and, above all, caring’ (p. 26). Depending on whether they communicated with clients from the US or the UK, they learned to speak more informally or with more courtesy; more than just what they said, they underwent training of the body and the voice ‘to produce the right affect in agents’ unscripted encounters with customers’ (Mankekar and Gupta, 2016: 27). In this sense, the affective labour freelancers perform is part of a process of subjectification in which they are produced as workers.

While I have centred the client-worker relationship in this paper, many more relationships played their parts in workers’ subjectification, such as those with family members, subcontractors or fellow designers they stayed in touch with in social media groups. The embeddedness in various relationships affected and further differentiated workers’ experiences of precariousness: for instance, the time dimension was affected by time commitments beyond paid work as well as workers’ support networks.

Conclusion

I have argued in this paper that precariousness in the gig economy entails affective labour in various forms as that is, freelancers strive to produce affect in their clients to convince them of their trustworthiness and to make collaborating a pleasant experience. Furthermore, I have explored how categories of difference are negotiated in these everyday interactions, that is, how the image of a ‘designer you’ll love’ is conveyed between the ideals of professionalism and authenticity. By foregrounding everyday practices of managing uncertainty, this study adds to the growing literature on subjective experiences of precariousness in digitally mediated work. It ties in with scholarly observations that state the complexity of endless possibilities in platform-mediated work, for example, to be overwhelming rather than liberating (Armano et al., 2022: 35). Moreover, by stressing how experiences differ between workers and from situation to situation, I have contributed to a more multi-faceted picture of precariousness.

The analysis has outlined nationality as a relevant category in intersectional analyses of translocal labour markets. The category comes in different shapes, such as ‘low-income country’ or ‘South Asian’. This suggests that embodied inequalities are not overcome in a digital labour market but emerge in new forms in this context. As predominantly white clients face predominantly workers of colour in the global gig economy, value is often ascribed along the lines of categories that tie workers to where they are based rather than perceiving them as part of a truly global labour market. Thus, physical attributes and ‘offline’ identities are enmeshed with how gig workers present themselves online, connecting online identities to embodied inequalities. By carving out nationality as a multi-dimensional and dynamic category in digital labour, this study contributes to debates on expanding the categories addressed in intersectional studies. The relatively homogenous sample of this study in terms of gender and class makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the negotiations and intersections of these categories, and longer participant observation, for example, might have uncovered further emic categories of difference. Nationality has emerged as a central category in this study, but further empirical studies could certainly build on this to carve out further relevant categories.

Moreover, through the lens of affective labour, I have shown how categories of difference emerge from interactions between workers, clients, and platforms. Freelancers perform identity work as they navigate anchoring their profiles in ‘offline identities’ enough to be considered authentic and trustworthy, while not departing too far from the image of a ‘neutral’ default worker. They negotiate their identities relationally, adjusting what they show of themselves to what they anticipate their clients to expect and prefer. By introducing affective labour in the form of producing relatable selves (Oechslen, 2023) as a lens to explore the negotiations of categories of difference in everyday interactions, this study leverages debates on relational subjectification processes through affect (Fotaki et al., 2017; Mankekar and Gupta, 2016) to address the need for ways to study dynamics of producing difference empirically (Dhamoon, 2011). Affective labour is relevant on two levels in negotiating the categories of difference I have outlined: First, the capacities to perform affective labour are not equally distributed. Second, categories of difference are shaped and reproduced through affective labour. This process-based perspective on the relational production of difference can add to intersectional methodologies by locating categories in interactions rather than presenting them as fixed attributes.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented as part of the sub-theme “Embodying Precarious Work: Intersectional Precariousness and Organizing for a Good Life“ at the EGOS Colloquium in Cagliari in 2023, and the insightful feedback I received there helped me greatly in developing it further. I am deeply grateful to the guest editors of this Special Issue and three anonymous reviewers, who have paid close attention to both the bigger picture and the details of this paper; their constructive comments and suggestions have been instrumental in sharpening the argument of the paper.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: As a member of the Leibniz Association, the IRS and thus this research is funded by the Federal Republic of Germany as well as the Federal State of Brandenburg.

ORCID iD

Anna Oechslen

Notes

Author biography

Anna Oechslen is a post-doctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner, Germany. She completed her PhD in Anthropological Studies in Culture and History at the University of Hamburg in 2023 with an ethnographic study on the everyday work practices of designers working remotely in the gig economy. She is interested in concepts of work and post-work imaginaries, feminist research approaches, and digital ethnography.

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