Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals highlight unemployment as one of the key challenges that still need to be addressed. Digital work is suggested as one of the solutions to address unemployment in developing countries because it provides new employment opportunities. The problem this study addressed is: There is little research that aligns digital work adoption with Sustainable Development Goal 8 (addressing unemployment) from the perspectives of both digital workers and digital work clients. The purpose of this study was to determine the contribution of digital work towards addressing unemployment in the South African context. The study provides a framework that focuses on the adoption of digital work from the experiences of digital workers and digital work clients in alignment with Sustainable Development Goals 8.5 and 8.6 targets. Sustainable Development Goal 8.5 states that employment should be decent and 8.6 aims to reduce youth not in employment, education and training. A survey research strategy was employed using a questionnaire to collect data from digital workers and Q-methodology was employed to collect data from digital work clients. Digital workers are individuals who provide services online, whereas digital work clients are organisations that demand services online.
Through exploratory factor analysis, the factors identified were governance and social perspective, infrastructure, social and personal status, intrinsic and extrinsic influence, digital work demand, platform conditions and autonomy and skills. Through the descriptive analysis, the profile of the digital workers was as follows: 22-48 years of age, mixed gender, a minimum of a high school qualification, entrepreneurial skills, who perceived themselves as independent contractors.
Q-methodology was used to identify four perspectives through inverse factor analysis, i.e. two social and two emerging perspectives. The two social perspectives were production-oriented adopters and digital worker-oriented adopters. The two emerging perspectives were platform-oriented adopters and adaptable adopters. The results of this study show that digital work creates new employment opportunities and contributes to addressing unemployment in the South African context, although there is a need to address challenges faced in the adoption of digital work. Q-methodology revealed the strategies that could be used to increase the demand for digital work services to create employment.