Original iLabour research team in June 2016 (from left): Alex Wood, Vili Lehdonvirta, Otto Kässi, and Gretta Corporaal.
The iLabour research project is now well into its final year, and I have some staff changes to report. Exciting new members have joined the team for the final lap, and our three original postdocs have moved on to wonderful new jobs, while continuing to collaborate with the project.
Our organizational sociologist Dr Gretta Corporaal has moved on to the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, where she is a holder of the prestigious British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Her new research project is called iWork: Investigating the Future of Work and Organizing in the Digital Platform Economy. Dr Otto Kässi, our labour economist who among other things built the Online Labour Index, is now a Research Economist at Etla Research in Finland. Dr Alex Wood, our labour sociologist, is a Lecturer in Sociology of Work at the University of Birmingham. We are fortunate in that all three also continue as Research Associates with the iLabour project, finishing up publications that are still in the pipeline and helping to mentor new recruits.
Our major new recruit is Dr Fabian Stephany, a computational social scientist who holds degrees in economics and social sciences from Universitá Bocconi Milan and University of Cambridge. Fabian has considerable experience as an economist and data scientist in the private sector and for international policy organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, and the OECD. In the iLabour project Fabian’s main responsibility is the Online Labour Index. We will have some exciting news about the future of the index later this year.
Wonderful new Research Assistants have also joined the team. Nicholas Martindale is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. An expert in quantitative sociology, he contributes to the iLabour data by analysing survey data on online freelancers. Godofredo Ramizo Jr, my doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute, is working on a literature review that reveals how the field has progressed over the past few years. Sumin Lee, also my doctoral student, is likewise working on a literature review and contributing to project administration.
Though the iLabour project is getting closer to the finishing line, my group will continue working on the online gig economy and the platform economy more generally. I will write about new research grants in a later post.