Isabel Munoz

Syracuse University | SU · School of Information Studies

What does work and career success mean for those who secure their work using digital labor platforms? Traditional research on success predominantly relies on organizationally-centric benchmarks, such as promotions and income. These measures provide limited insights into the evolving nature of work and careers shaped at the intersection of digital l...

We contribute empirical and conceptual insights regarding the roles of digital labor platforms in online freelancing, focusing attention to social identities such as gender, race, ethnicity, and occupation. Findings highlight how digital labor platforms reinforce and exacerbate identity-based stereotypes, bias and expectations in online freelance w...

Flexibility is recognized as one of the major shifts in the future of work. As emerging forms and structures of work challenge us to rethink how work is organized, specifically through the digitization of work by digital platforms, we are witnessing shifts in workplaces that challenge common models of full-time employment. To date, most frameworks...

We advance the concept of deconstructed identity to explain how online workers' identities are being reshaped, diminished and controlled by digital labor platforms. We focus on online freelance workers and contribute to contemporary conceptualizations regarding worker's self-presentation. The empirical basis for our analysis and theorizing build fr...

We report findings and discuss implications from a panel study of 68 U.S.-based online freelancers. These findings emerge from analysis of two rounds of data collection: The first round straddled the arrival of COVID in 2020 and the ensuing pandemic-inspired economic downturn. The second round, from early 2021, provides insight into how online work...

While many technology-based approaches to support people living with HIV target specific clinical goals, recent work has begun to consider how to design support in the context of HIV stigma. Here, we consider two challenges; the first, and central challenge is how to work with a small group of stakeholders to design for the much larger, but hard to...

We report findings from an ongoing panel study of 68 U.S.-based online freelancers, focusing here on their experiences both pre- and in-pandemic. We see online freelancing as providing a window into one future of work: collaborative knowledge work that is paid by the project and mediated by a digital labor platform. The study’s purposive sampling p...

This study combines market-level data about changes in jobs offered via online labor platforms and interviews with online freelance workers to highlight how freelancers are responding to the novel coronavirus’s presence. We pursue this work recognizing that as the scope and breadth of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grow, the implications to wor...