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This thesis examines platform-mediated gig work in Sweden as a differentiated and internally contradictory labour regime. Through qualitative interviews with gig workers, supplemented by ethnographic observations and analyses of policy, media, platform, and union material, the thesis explores how platform labour is structured, governed, and experienced. It investigates how contradictions between flexibility and control, autonomy and constraint, and innovation and exploitation emerge through processes of labour market segmentation, digital mediation, spatio-temporal organisation, and platform urbanisation. Drawing on labour geography, Marxist political economy, and Marxist-feminist approaches, the thesis conceptualises platform-mediated gig work not as a singular or exceptional form of work, but as an intensification and reorganisation of longer-standing dynamics of labour market inequality, exploitation, and spatio-temporal discipline. 

The thesis consists of four research articles. Article I examines labour market segmentation in the Swedish gig economy. It shows that flexibility operates dialectically as both a potential source of autonomy and a mechanism of control, and that experiences of precarity are shaped by workers’ differential positions within labour markets and broader social relations. Article II explores the spatio-temporal organisation of gig work. It argues that the flexibility afforded to platforms and customers depends upon the spatial and temporal inflexibility of workers, particularly migrant workers in cleaning and delivery, who must be available both “just-in-time” and “just-in-place”. Article III examines labour agency through the framework of resilience, reworking, and resistance. It finds that agency is not absent in platform labour, but fragmented and unevenly organised through the spatio-temporal logics of platform work. Resilience emerges under conditions of compression and isolation, reworking through partial decompression, and resistance through fragile moments of synchronisation. Article IV develops the concept of spectral infrastructures to explore how platform urbanism reorganises urban space, visibility, and labour. It demonstrates that the apparent frictionlessness of on-demand consumption depends upon the uneven visibility of the workers and infrastructures that sustain everyday urban life.

It is concluded that platform-mediated gig work in Sweden constitutes a differentiated labour regime organised through contradiction. Across the papers, the conditions that enable flexibility, autonomy, visibility, and mobility for some workers simultaneously generate insecurity, waiting, opacity, and constraint for others. These contradictions are experienced unevenly and are disproportionately borne by differently positioned workers. The findings further suggest that platform labour develops through existing labour market structures, reproducing inequalities associated with migration status, labour market position, and access to social and institutional protections. The thesis therefore argues that platform labour reconfigures rather than transcends existing inequalities, reproducing uneven conditions of work through digitally mediated forms of organisation, coordination, and control.