Journal of Sociology

This special issue of the Journal of Sociology explores the variegated nature of digital labour platforms and their operations across the Global South and Global North. In recent years, digital labour platforms have emerged as a significant technological wave, reshaping and reconfiguring the landscapes of labour and the broader economy. However, their emergence and expansion have not followed uniform trajectories across different parts of the world. Within this context, drawing on case studies from Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, France, Sweden and the UK, the contributors examine how platform work is shaped by shared ‘techno-social logics’ while remaining differentiated by local contexts, power relations and modes of contestation.

Platforms mediating care services are increasingly reshaping the geographies of social reproduction, offering care fixes to some, while exacerbating the crisis of care for others. In this paper, we draw on research on healthcare, deliveries and cleaning platforms in Sweden to argue that platforms reinforce and redistribute flows of care privilege and care poverty between the Global North and the Global South, between urban and rural locations, and within cities, thus deepening the uneven geographies of care. These uneven geographies apply to those performing social reproductive work as well. While the working conditions of migrant platform cleaners have clear repercussions for their own social reproduction, other segments, such as healthcare professionals, may experience platform work as a fix to both working conditions and work–life balance. Ultimately, we propose that the political economy of social reproduction unfolds as a spatially uneven process, making life easier for some and harder for others.

Work on food delivery platforms is characterised by increasing vulnerability and a disproportionate representation of a racialised male workforce composed primarily of (undocumented) migrants. Despite mounting criticism of the gig economy model, entrepreneurial discourses and practices continue to be celebrated, produced, and reproduced by politicians, mainstream media, and workers alike. This article draws on three years of ethnographic research with food couriers in the UK and France and explores how platform workers mobilise entrepreneurial aspirations to assess and enact their masculinity within and beyond the workspace. It focuses on two common tactics adopted by these workers: account renting and multi-apping. However, the intensification of work resulting from these practices – combined with a lack of citizenship rights and economic precarity – ultimately undermines their entrepreneurial ambitions.

This article examines how YouTube creators act as neoliberal pedagogues in the circulation of data work platforms. Drawing on a qualitative examination of 43 videos, it investigates how these creators embed entrepreneurial logics and moral discourses into the everyday practices of aspiring workers. We argue that YouTube operates as a paraplatform that mediates how data work is circulated, legitimized, and contested across transnational contexts. The analysis identifies three key dimensions: (1) motivational aesthetics and slogans that frame data work as desirable and morally legitimate; (2) tactics and skills conveyed through step-by-step tutorials that both naturalize and expand the platform labor circuit; and (3) contested discourses in which frustration and disillusionment surface but are often reabsorbed into neoliberal pedagogies. These pedagogies converge into relatively standardized repertoires, revealing how religious and moral frameworks reinforce neoliberal pedagogies. The article theorizes creators as discursive-ideological intermediaries who reproduce individualized survival strategies, absorb critique, and shape worker subjectivities within global circuits of data work.

The “information economy” is a mixed blessing, since it widens social division between workers who possess digital abilities and those who do not. Urban labor markets in cities, particularly in the Global South, have greatly been transformed due to the growing expansion of app-based transportation platforms. As existing studies rely largely on qualitative studies, hence, using a quantitative method, this paper examined how the app-based transportation system in Dhaka, Bangladesh, affected the employment and livelihoods of traditional transport workers. This study explored that app-based transportation platforms attract numerous digitally savvy professionals; thus, using survey data from 480 respondents, it is shown that traditional and digitally illiterate transport workers and their earnings have become vulnerable in Dhaka city. This paper offers recommendations for developing and implementing policies to enhance digital skills that will effectively include them in the platform economy, thereby reducing their employment and livelihood vulnerabilities and safeguarding their rights within the information economy.

This article examines how Chinese digital platforms export tight temporal governance, characterised by algorithmic urgency, work intensification, and short-term monetisation, into Global North labour markets. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025), it analyses two Chinese-owned platforms operating in Australia: Bigo Live, a livestreaming platform, and HungryPanda, a food delivery platform serving Asian diasporic communities. Rather than treating Australia as a uniformly protected labour regime, the article approaches it as a typical Global North dualised core–periphery system, where stable working conditions are concentrated within a protected core while peripheral workers face increasing time insecurity, despite a broader discourse of fairness and protection that is not consistently realised in practise. Within this context, Chinese platforms extend domestic labour practises across borders and amplify pre-existing forms of time insecurity, along with racialised understandings of international labour, through platformised governance, algorithmic incentives, and migration precarity.

This article focuses on migrant youth in regional areas of Australia who write and perform hip-hop. Hip-hop music serves as a means of ‘juggling’ the contradictions in the sense of belonging experienced by these young people, who identify as both ‘Australians’ and ‘migrants’, while also addressing regional inequalities that affect a young generation. The article examines the regional cultural context in which migrant youth create and engage in cultural practices of self-expression, reimagining and ‘localising’ global hip-hop culture. Regional practices of hip-hop can be seen as indicators of transformations in regional cultural identities brought about by gradual changes in demographics and the growing presence of non-Western migrants. The article draws on the potential wider cultural and social impacts of migrant youth's music-making, urging policymakers to utilise these grassroots practices in regional cultural, migration and settlement policies.

Healthcare worker migration and international student migration have received extensive attention in public, political and scholarly discourse. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted Australia's fraught relationship with students and healthcare workers from overseas and these tensions persist. Despite these parallel tracks of concern, the connections between healthcare and education migration have been underexplored. Building on Robertson's ‘education−migration nexus’ and grounded in Wyss and Dahinden’s ‘entangled mobilities’ approach, the paper proposes the healthcare−education-migration nexus as a framework for understanding the interdependencies of international education and Australia's healthcare workforce. Drawing on in-depth interviews with overseas-trained healthcare workers, this paper presents five ‘exemplary entanglements’ between these two domains, often characterised as operating under different structural, regulatory and discursive regimes. The findings show that international education underpins the mobility pathways of healthcare workers in Australia. With policymakers proposing restrictions on student migration, this paper points to potential unintended consequences for Australia's struggling care economy.

This paper critically examines conceptualizations of “transnational,” “global” or “cosmopolitan” habitus in migration, globalization and inequality research. We conceptualize habitus as a configuration of basic dispositions, using items from the Schwartz values battery, and compare the effect of habitual dispositions, class, and migration on cosmopolitan self-identification via country-specific multiple regression models, based on data from the World Values Survey (2005–2015) of around 100,000 individuals from 74 countries. We show that migration experiences and habitual dispositions of openness to new and stimulating experiences rather than orientations toward tradition and security are associated with stronger global self-identification. We also find a tendency among the upper classes toward cosmopolitan identification; however, these effects vary between an economic and a cultural capital route as well as among societies. Our findings thus caution against the uncritical use of “one-size-fits-all” concepts such as transnational, global and cosmopolitan habitus independent from specific social and cultural contexts.

In Australia's multicultural ageing context, older immigrants’ community participation is shaped by institutional arrangements that value inclusion yet struggle to accommodate cultural difference. This article examines how CASS Care Ltd, a long-standing community organisation, supported culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) older adults to become volunteers. Drawing on qualitative analysis of group activities and interviews, the study finds that the defining feature of the CASS Model is assisted self-governance, composed of three interdependent elements: empowerment, institutional support, and cultural sensitivity. Together, these elements explain how older immigrants transition from passive service recipients to active community volunteers. We argue that assisted self-governance is a practical model of culturally responsive governance through which volunteering becomes both community-led and institutionally supported and sustained. By theorising this model, the article advances understandings of ageing, migration, and multicultural governance, illustrating how inclusion can be achieved through relational and culturally grounded forms of organisation.