Research · Project
Transactional Careers
Online knowledge workers, interviewed year after year since 2019. More than 450 conversations about what a career looks like when work is bought and sold through a digital platform.
Work in the United States is moving away from long-term employment toward contingent, project-based arrangements mediated by digital systems. This project studies that shift where it is most advanced: online labor platforms, which we treat not merely as marketplaces but as living laboratories for the future of work. Most research on this kind of work is cross-sectional — a survey, a wave of interviews, a snapshot. This project is built on the opposite premise. Since 2019 we have followed the same panel of US-based online knowledge workers, returning to them year after year to understand how their work, their sense of themselves, and their livelihoods change over time, through the pandemic and after it.
What we ask
How do careers unfold when work is mediated by a platform? What does "success" mean to the people doing this work, and how does it differ from what platforms measure? How do gender, race, and occupation shape who thrives, who stalls, and who leaves? And what does flexibility, the platform economy's central promise, actually deliver?
How we work
The analytical strategy has three complementary components: cross-sectional comparison within each wave of interviews, longitudinal comparison across waves, and comparative case analysis. We are now building structured case studies of each respondent, which will serve as the basis for fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), combining crisp sets such as age and gender with fuzzy-set depictions of career choices, such as the role contingent work plays in a person's career.
What we have found so far
The project's central contribution is the concept of the transactional career: a professional life built as a sequence of distinct projects rather than a continuous employment history, prized for its flexibility and shadowed by a persistent need for stable work. We have shown how platforms deconstruct a worker's professional identity into platform-specific metrics, so that experience gained elsewhere becomes secondary to ratings earned on the platform; how the resulting platform-specific capital locks workers in because it does not transfer; and how these dynamics replicate, and occasionally redress, inequalities of gender and race. The panel has also produced work on worker-centered definitions of success, on the meaning of flexibility after the "great realization" of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic redistributed work among online freelancers. Publications from the project are listed on the publications page.