An international symposium held at the School of Business, Management and Economics (BMEc) has attracted global scholars and industry experts to discuss the gig economy and algorithmic management.

'A symposium on continuities, disruptions and management in the gig economy!' was hosted jointly by BMEc, the Talking About Organizations Podcast and the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies on 15 December 2017.

The event brought together a diverse range of speakers to exchange ideas and discuss the historical roots of management by algorithm in the context of the gig economy.

The majority of participants are active researchers in information systems management with projects looking directly into the gig economy and/or algorithmic management. Others specialise in labour relations, bureaucracy and management classics. 

Themes for the day's panel discussions, two of which were all-female, were:

• the characteristics and effects of the contemporary sharing/gig economy
• studying the sharing economy
• connecting classics and the contemporary sharing economy. 

Speakers included:

• Prof Natalia Levina (Professor of Information Systems, New York University)
• Sarah O’Connor (Employment Correspondent, Financial Times)
• Gretta Corporaal (Researcher, University of Oxford)
• Arianna Tassinari (Doctoral Researcher, Industrial Relations Research Unit, Warwick Business School)
• Dr Mareike Möhlmann (Assistant Professor, Warwick Business School)
• Dr Pedro Monteiro (Research Fellow, Warwick Business School)
• Dr Rebecca Prentice (Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Sussex)
• Dmitrijs Kravcenko (Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour, University of Sussex, and co-founder of the Talking About Organizations Podcast)

Dmitrijs, who organised the event and whose own research focuses on social epistemology and management theory, commented: 

"The event has been highly successful in terms of the feedback I received from a number of participants, who were impressed that the event was put together by young scholars which, in the opinion of those who commented, made it more conversational and less dogmatic.

"They were also were pleased that we had practitioners, a prolific FT correspondent who writes on this topic extensively, and colleagues from sociology and anthropology in attendance.

"Overall, we welcomed 36 participants from the UK, the US, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Cyprus, Greece and the Netherlands, with a mix of PhD students, junior faculty, readers and very senior scholars."

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