About

Lindsey Cameron is an assistant professor of management and the Dorinda and Mark Winkelman Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, with an appointment in the sociology department. Her research centers on the future of work, specifically examining how algorithmic management and artificial intelligence are transforming the modern workplace, with a particular focus on the gig economy. She conducts ethnographic research, including an ongoing eight-year study of the ride-hailing industry, to analyze how algorithms influence managerial control and worker experiences. Cameron has also studied the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gig workers across various platforms and is engaged in projects exploring how the gig economy adapts in the Global South, along with workforce development related to technology. Her scholarly work has been published in leading academic journals and she has received numerous awards for her research and teaching. Additionally, she has contributed opinion pieces to prominent outlets and her work has been featured in various media outlets, highlighting her influence in the field of management and labor studies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Business
• Marketing
• Public relations
• Economics
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Law
• Process management
• Medicine
• Knowledge management
• Management

Selected publications

• From Amway to Uber: A genealogy of sponsored entrepreneurship

  Platforms & Society · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article develops a new history of gig work by turning to the margins of standard histories of capitalism. In contrast to prior research, which has used historical analogies to describe the contemporary gig economy, we develop a genealogy of three organizational forms that have sponsored entrepreneurship in the United States since the early twentieth century: multi-level marketing organizations, franchises, and platforms. We analyze how all three organizational forms have restructured work by appealing to individuals, communities, and states, promising solutions to forms of marginalization and exclusion that existing employment laws and norms created. However, we find that sponsored entrepreneurship tends to perpetuate and even exacerbate the inequalities that it purports to remedy.

  PublisherDOI

• The Perils of Pay Variability: Determinants of Worker Aversion to Variable Compensation in Low- and Middle-Wage Jobs

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Indirect Contact and Knowledge Interventions to Improve Relations in the Disabled‐Nondisabled Intergroup Context: A Systematic Review

  Journal of Applied Social Psychology · 2025-01-28 · 1 citations

  reviewOpen access

  ABSTRACT Stigma and prejudice towards individuals with disabilities is still prevalent in society today (Livneh, Chan, and Kaya 2014). Our aim was to evaluate the state of the research that tests interventions aiming to improve such attitudes, including uncovering which intervention methods can reduce this prejudice and identifying gaps in the research. Since a large proportion of nondisabled individuals will not have the opportunity for direct contact with disabled individuals, our systematic review focuses on non‐direct‐contact interventions, specifically knowledge‐based and indirect contact techniques. Fifty‐one studies published between 2001 and 2022 met all criteria, including the use of a comparison or control group. Overall, most studies did have a positive change on outcome measures, with some maintaining the effect weeks or months later. Despite intervention successes, trends indicating gaps in the research were uncovered including the focus on child and undergraduate student participants, and the lack of collaborative research with the disabled communities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Selling the self: Neo-normative control and the platform paradox

  Research in Organizational Behavior · 2025-11-20 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The platform economy is an increasingly large segment of the contemporary economy that continues to attract workers, drawing on narratives of self-empowerment and entrepreneurship that are idolized within American culture. Yet, the realized lived experiences of workers are often anything but that of a flourishing entrepreneur, with many describing economic precarity, invasive and unpredictable algorithmic control, and demanding hours. What keeps people invested in returning to platform work? We label this observed contradiction the platform paradox , and we theorize how this paradox is continuously regenerated through neo-normative control, a modern form of workplace control that encourages workers to express their ‘authentic’ selves, individuality, and emotions in ways that align with organizational goals. Drawing on extant scholarship, we identify three neo-normative control mechanisms—framing self-as-product, whole self-integration, and hyper-gamification—that support platform workers in experiencing themselves as independent entrepreneurs while also increasing their control by the platform and its algorithmic management system. We illustrate how these controls collectively contribute to adverse consequences on two core work experiences: worker skill and worker time. We propose future research directions to further unpack this paradox and for the field of platform scholarship at-large, discussing implications for inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• Bottom Up Reliability: People as Infrastructure in Global Platform Work

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The burgeoning of the platform economy has sparked a growing interest in the global phenomenon of platform work. Yet, few studies have examined how platform work changes in a global context, affecting the reliability of platform organizations. Drawing on an eight-year qualitative study of workers in in the largest sector of the platform economy, the ride-hailing industry, in five informal economies in the Global South (Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa), we describe how, in the face of limited resources and the platform’s partial technical closure, workers create reliability. We identify three bottom-up reliability practices. In asset work, workers obtain and maintain material and relational resources for platform access; in closure work, workers bridge gaps between the algorithmic management system and their environments; and in security work, workers manage off-app relationships that ensure their safety. These practices are cognitively intensive, highly relational, and expensive, and though largely invisible to the platform, are essential for the platform’s reliability. Thus, we argue, it is people (workers), and not algorithmic technology, that are the core infrastructure of platforms. We conclude with implications about how to build a global platform organization that fulfills its promise for portable work for all.

  PublisherDOI

• Taming Platform Power: Taking Accountability into Account in the Management of Platforms

  Academy of Management Annals · 2024 · 91 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Business

  Research on multisided platforms has emphasized how platform owners accumulate significant power over other platform actors, such as producers and customers, arguing for the need to balance such power with accountability. We review two perspectives on platform accountability: (a) a bottom-up, emergent perspective that focuses on the collective action taken by lower-powered platform actors such as producers (e.g., gig workers, app developers) to enhance rule adequacy and push back against platform owners’ power; and (b) a top-down, institutional perspective that emphasizes preventing extractive opportunism and maintaining a level playing field among different platform actors by enabling legal, regulatory, and governance changes. The bottom-up perspective’s overarching focus is on procedural (rule-focused) fairness, while the top-down perspective’s focus is largely on distributive (outcome-focused) fairness. While both perspectives are important, they have limitations regarding platform accountability, especially given the power and informational asymmetries inherent among platform actors. Therefore, synthesizing across literatures, we provide a framework for platform accountability that accounts for both procedural and distributive fairness, and is based on a fundamental premise: multisided platforms require multisided accountability systems. Thus, our review proposes an approach for enforcing platform accountability that has the potential to rebalance the power between high-powered and low-powered platform actors.

  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Research in an Artificial Intelligence-Driven World

  Journal of Management Inquiry · 2024-02-22 · 53 citations

  articleOpen access

  Current and future developments in artificial intelligence (AI) systems have the capacity to revolutionize the research process for better or worse. On the one hand, AI systems can serve as collaborators as they help streamline and conduct our research. On the other hand, such systems can also become our adversaries when they impoverish our ability to learn as theorists, or when they lead us astray through inaccurate, biased, or fake information. No matter which angle is considered, and whether we like it or not, AI systems are here to stay. In this curated discussion, we raise questions about human centrality and agency in the research process, and about the multiple philosophical and practical challenges we are facing now and ones we will face in the future.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fighting the Algorithm

  2024-11-12

  book-chapter

  A long tradition of labour geography, industrial relations, sociology, and organisational research has examined worker activism, documenting how shared experiences, collective identities, and a sense of solidarity can spur workers to engage in collective action in response to grievances. However, work in the on-demand economy challenges traditional pathways to activism. To shed light on how workers mobilise in a distributed, algorithmically managed environment, this chapter draws on a qualitative case study of workers’ involvement in the #DeclineNow movement on the on-demand food delivery platform DoorDash. Building upon prior work, the chapter defines algo-activism as a distinct form of dispersed action in which workers collectively draw upon their shared experiences with an algorithmic manager to identify and implement specific actions to redress their grievances. Through our case study, this chapter documents three algo-activism practices such that a shared understandings about the algorithm evolves, leading to the creation of an algorithmic imaginary that can reckon with the power of the algorithmic management system.

  PublisherDOI

• The Making of the “Good Bad” Job: How Algorithmic Management Manufactures Consent Through Constant and Confined Choices

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2024-03-14 · 98 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This research explores how a new relation of production—the shift from human managers to algorithmic managers on digital platforms—manufactures workplace consent. While most research has argued that the task standardization and surveillance that accompany algorithmic management will give rise to the quintessential “bad job” (Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson, 2000; Kalleberg, 2011), I find that, surprisingly, many workers report liking and finding choice while working under algorithmic management. Drawing on a seven-year qualitative study of the largest sector in the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, I describe how workers navigate being managed by an algorithm. I begin by showing how algorithms segment the work at multiple sites of human–algorithm interactions and how this configuration of the work process allows for more-frequent and narrow choice. I find that workers use two sets of tactics. In engagement tactics, individuals generally follow the algorithmic nudges and do not try to get around the system; in deviance tactics, individuals manipulate their input into the algorithmic management system. While the behaviors associated with these tactics are practical opposites, they both elicit consent, or active, enthusiastic participation by workers to align their efforts with managerial interests, and both contribute to workers seeing themselves as skillful agents. However, this choice-based consent can mask the more-structurally problematic elements of the work, contributing to the growing popularity of what I call the “good bad” job.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond and Behind Platforms and Algorithms: Exploring the Lived Experiences of Gig Workers

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09 · 1 citations

  article

  While the literature on gig work is expanding rapidly, many are the issues that need to be answered in order to fully understand the lived experiences of gig workers and illuminate the dynamics of gig work. Despite it is widely recognized that gig workers constitute an heterogenous workforce, for instance, seminal works have focused on finding similarities among gig workers across platforms, while the mechanisms behind different gig workers’ behaviors and perceptions are still widely obscure. Moreover, most of the literature focuses on what gig workers do individually on platforms, but not – or only cursorily – on how these workers manage the interplay between their online and offline activities. Specifically, comprehending how the online dimensions of work blur or integrate with offline aspects of gig workers’ lives – such as family condition or family needs, the presence of alternative, offline jobs, the cultural context of the community and country of origin – is of significant importance. This symposium addresses these issues by examining what happens behind and beyond platforms, and by presenting four papers looking at different gig workers’ experiences and different forms of interplay between online and offline aspects of gig work. A Multi-National Ethnography of Ride-Hailing in the Global South Author: Lindsey Cameron; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Bobbi Thomason; Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Understanding African Digital Platform Workers’ Behaviours through the Lens of Omoluwabi Ethos Author: Ayomikun Idowu; U. of Sussex Business School Gig workers and Wellbeing: How is Algorithmic Work related to Work-Life Balance? Author: Francesca Bellesia; Dep. of Sciences and Methods for Engineering, U. of Modena and Reggio Emilia Author: Fabiola Bertolotti; U. of Modena and Reggio Emilia Author: Elisa Mattarelli; San Jose State U. Gig work in organizations: Trends and perspectives from Human Resource Management professionals Author: Ksenia Keplinger; Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Author: Aizhan Tursunbayeva; Parthenope U. of Naples Author: Vindhya Singh; Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Author: Stefano Di Lauro; U. Mercatorum

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hatim A. Rahman

  12 shared

• Gretchen M. Spreitzer

  6 shared

• Arvind Karunakaran

  Stanford University

  5 shared

• Lyndon Garrett

  Boston College

  4 shared

• Ksenia Keplinger

  Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

  4 shared

• Bobbi Thomason

  Pepperdine University

  4 shared

• Vanessa Conzon

  Boston College

  3 shared

• Tawanna R. Dillahunt

  Michigan United

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Management Department

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  2019

Awards & honors

• Wharton Teaching Excellence Award