The gig economy is not only transforming work; it has also generated a rapidly expanding and surprisingly fragmented research field. This talk maps gig economy scholarship from 2010–2025 using bibliometric data on the 1,000 most-cited articles, co-citation network analysis, and longitudinal keyword coding. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of academic fields and a Regulation Theory heuristic (production, accumulation, regulation, societization), I show how symbolic capital concentrates around labor-process and legal-classification research, while finance, valuation, and capital accumulation remain comparatively understudied. Citation networks reveal mini-canons and a small set of bridging texts that connect otherwise siloed subfields. I argue that these patterns reflect institutional opportunity structures: what is methodologically accessible becomes intellectually central. The payoff is diagnostic: by treating scholarship itself as an object of field analysis, we can anticipate how adjacent domains may institutionalize, stratify, and fragment.

**This event is co-organised by Stone Centre on Socio-Economic Inequality in Asia (SCoSEIA) at the University of Hong Kong

About the speaker:

William Charles is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Miami University (Department of Sociology & Gerontology). His research sits at the intersection of economic sociology, organizational theory, and political economy, with a focus on platform labor and the gig economy, field formation and knowledge production, and the institutional dynamics shaping contemporary work. He uses mixed methods, including qualitative interviews, digital ethnography, and bibliometric mapping, to study how emerging economies and organizational forms become intelligible, governable, and contested.

📅 Date: Tuesday, 20 January, 2026

🕑 Time: 10:30 am – 11:30 am

📍 Venue: CJT-9.29

🗣️ Language: English

🔗 Register here: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104620