This chapter explores new ways of organizing shaped by technology and globalization, focusing on self-organizing structures, remote work, and platforms. Self-organizing and bossless organizations like holacracy and podularity emphasize autonomy and decentralized decision-making, as seen in GitHub and Valve. Remote work, enabled by digital tools, allows flexibility and productivity, with firms like GitLab using asynchronous communication and modular task design. Challenges include maintaining culture and collaboration. Platforms like Amazon and Uber connect stakeholders via digital interfaces, using algorithms and modularity to scale and adapt. These models raise concerns about worker roles and algorithmic control. Self-organization can appear in all configurations, including divisional models like Haier’s, which uses autonomous teams coordinated through platforms and incentives. The chapter concludes by transitioning to the design of processes and people systems to support these evolving structures.

The introduction briefly reviews the growing significance of remote work and then presents the volume’s holistic and interactive approach to studying the impact and regulation of this employment approach. With a rooting in methodological discussions and institutional analysis, this approach assumes that the full impact of remote work can only be understood by identifying and analyzing ways in which different employment forms and their regulation interact with one another in complex ways. Thus, for example, an employee’s work is not only remote or located in the traditional workplace but it is also part time or full time and so forth. Moreover, each of these conditions may be only partial in nature. Not only in empirical reality but also in the regulation of work, types of employment and their regulation interact with one another in ways that the volume identifies, explains and theorizes, opening up new understandings. The introduction then lays out the thematic concerns and main arguments of the chapters authored by a distinguished set of contributors.

Technology has fundamentally changed work including where it happens, how people collaborate, and how people hire and pay workers. This contribution discusses the implications of these changes for classic tax questions, such as jurisdiction, expenses, worker classification, and tax reporting. Beyond these tax issues, this contribution offers two broad warnings. First, tax regimes should be wary of treating people more like businesses and less like workers of old. Second, despite a long tradition of social safety nets in many jurisdictions across the world, the pandemic created a new and rapid need to assist disrupted workers – and in some countries the tax system proved critical in facilitating a government response. Such an option is available to governments only if the tax administration is sufficiently healthy. Accordingly, jurisdictions must invest in the tax administration infrastructure, not just for regular operations with taxpayers, but for moments of crisis as well. Finally, this paper identifies broader cautions for tax systems in the coming decades.

Geopolitical tensions are reshaping the future of work, influencing who works, how work is performed, and where it takes place. As nations become increasingly protective of their technological advantages and intellectual property, remote work is facing resistance and there is a shift toward more localized talent pools. While creating new opportunities in some regions, it is also limiting them in others. The nature of work itself is evolving in response to these tensions. Remote work, cybersecurity, new protocols, and organizational practices are fundamentally altering how employees interact with information and each other. Moreover, the physical location of work is being reevaluated. Companies are revising job descriptions and requiring top managers to engage in the political process. There is a cultural shift in how work is done as companies import practices from other locations. Organizational changes tilt the balance toward discord rather than harmony. There is more emphasis on retooling and reskilling as countries try to maintain a domestic labor force.

In Chapter 6, we present our reconceptualization of organizational control. We discuss four fundamental shifts in organizations – from face-to-face work to remote work; from stable, full-time work to alternative work arrangements; from human managers to algorithmic control; and from traditional to platform-mediated gig work – and discuss the impact of these shifts on organizational control. Our reconceptualization consists of both a conceptual part, where we advance a configurational approach to model the causal complexity inherent in organizational control, and an empirical part, where we present exemplary archetypes of control configurations across a variety of twenty-first-century organizations, including US trucking companies, GitLab, Amazon warehouses, Uber, and Upwork.

Access to Austrian employment law is dependent on whether an individual can be regarded as an ‘employee’. Essentially, the idiosyncratic protection provided by employment law is awarded based on a binary option: the subordinate ‘employee’ in contrast to the self-employed person. Intermediary categories – such as the ‘quasi-subordinate’ status – are mere exceptions, although with increasing importance.

Austrian law does not provide a given notion of the ‘employee’. The Austrian Civil Code came into force in 1812, when special protection for employees was not considered necessary.

Denmark is a Scandinavian country of 5.8 million inhabitants. It is a constitutional monarchy, and state powers are divided between the parliament (legislative), the government (executive), and the courts (judiciary). The rule of law is a fundamental principle in the Danish legal system. Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world, and presumably also among the happiest. In the area of digitalisation, Denmark is among the most digitalised countries in the EU as well as globally.

Defining the employment relationship in the United States is not an endeavor for timid souls. The hallmark of American work law, especially its classification of employees and employers, is confusion. And that confusion has only intensified as emerging technologies have changed both the way that many people work and their relationship to the companies that profit from that work. The result of this trend has been an amplification of a long-existing problem: the exclusion of workers from workplace protections because they fall outside statutory definitions of the employment relationship.

Since the Dutch debate about the digitisation of labour is often reduced to a debate about how to qualify a contract between a worker and the platform they work through, or work for, the definition of the term ‘employment contract’ deserves a lengthy discussion. This approach means that the other effects of technological changes, such as changes in the organisation of work owing to changing structures of authority, receive far less attention. In Section II, I examine the definition of an employment contract and the obligations associated with employment contracts, partly to distinguish them from contracts for services. I also discuss the incentives for avoiding employment contracts or the associated obligations. As a result, Section II also includes discussions of flexible employment relationships, domestic work, and, of course, contracts for services, each – to the extent possible – in light of technological developments.

Technological innovation has disrupted standard forms of employment and fragmented the world of work, creating new digital sites of work and new modes of work organised around digital platforms. The arrangements for platform work, which vary in form and substance, defy classification in terms of the traditional configuration of employment and bypass the boundaries of South African labour law. Even the net of protection designed to provide labour rights for atypical (non-standard) forms of work is inadequate and excludes vulnerable workers in the digital economy from its scope. As such, work in the digital economy is largely ‘characterised by an absence of effective labour regulation’.

In 1969, David A. Morse received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Labour Organization (ILO). In his Nobel Lecture, the then Director-General (DG) explained how the organization contributes to ‘an infrastructure of peace’ by providing Member States with ‘a meeting ground’ for cooperation and dialogue. This meeting ground is characterized by tripartism and universalism, two qualities that make the ILO stand out. Tripartism, in which governments and workers’ and employers’ representatives discuss and decide on all ILO action, ‘was both the most daring and the most valuable innovation of the Peace Conference’. By setting up the ILO in tripartite fashion, the social dialogue between trade unions, employers’ organizations, and governments was presented as a viable approach to resolving social conflict. As Morse suggested, if tripartism ‘could be accepted and applied in Geneva, why not at home?’.