Earlier this month, I was on a panel at re:publica titled ‘Perspectives from developing countries – It’s the End of the work as we know It (and I feel fine)!’. Half of the panel is in German, but if you (aren’t a German speaker) can skip through to the English-language parts.
A network that I am part of – the The Future of Work in Developing Countries initiative – has just put out a new publication titled ‘The Future of Work in the Global South’. You can download the full publication here. It also contains a piece by my colleagues and I on the potentials of… Read More »
It has almost been a year since I finished the final draft of my dissertation about African innovation hubs. In the meantime, a number of publications have come out about hubs in Africa and elsewhere, some in high-profile venues (references are below). This probably signifies that hubs are becoming accepted as a unique and interesting organizational… Read More »
I have a short piece in New Statesman about the rise of what I am calling a planetary labour market. I wrote it because this will be the first year in human history in which a majority of the world’s population is connected to the internet. The internet is therefore no longer a network that… Read More »
I’m happy to report on a new co-authored paper that I have out. The piece asks what difference changing connectivity has made for East African firms. The piece emerges from a multi-year study on Development and Broadband Internet Access in East Africa that evolved into the current ‘Geonet‘ project. Foster, C., Graham, M., Mann, L., Waema, T., and… Read More »
Nature just published a published a long article about the ‘three ways that the digital revolution is reshaping workforces around the world.’ Amir Anwar and I were interviewed for it, and the article includes some of our findings from our research in Africa and Asia. You can read the full piece here: http://www.nature.com/news/the-shape-of-work-to-come-1.22839
The Geonet team will attend next year’s Global Conference of Economic Geography (GCEG) in full strength, running two hopefully lively sessions. Both run under the larger theme “Digital Economies, Digital Connectivity, Digital Margins.” Papers can be submitted between 15 Nov 2017 and 15 March 2018 on the GCEG website (https://www.gceg2018.com). Digital Economies, Digital Connectivity,… Read More »
In a previous blog post, we’ve mapped the availability of online labour in 2016 [1] using the data provided by the Online Labour Index (OLI) measuring the utilization of online labour platforms [2]. The OLI is based on tracking all projects and tasks posted into a selected sample of platforms, using API access and web scraping.… Read More »
The previous post in this mini-series, Who can access the internet?, looked at internet penetration in country context. In this post, we compare world regions and their access to the internet. This box plot visualization shows the distribution of per-country internet penetration, i.e. the percentage of the population of countries that has accessed the internet… Read More »
New forms of digital work have emerged which, in theory, can be done from anywhere. Does this mean that geography no longer matters to digital work? Not exactly. My new chapter with Amir Anwar draws on our empirical research into digital labor to outline how geography still matters, and who it matters for in a… Read More »