Christophe Vanroelen (BRISPO) and Janine Leschke (Copenhagen Business School) have published a new chapter: “The Study of Job Quality in a Hyper-Flexible Labor Market: Conceptual and Empirical Challenges”. It appears in “Occupational Health in a New World of Work”, edited by Christophe Vanroelen, Lisa Seubert and Theo Bodin, in Springer’s Handbook Series in Occupational Health Sciences.
Most of what we know about job quality comes from research on permanent employees. That leaves out a growing group of workers: platform and freelance workers, people with multiple jobs, marginal and on-call workers, posted workers and people who work independently of time and place.
The chapter describes what this “hyper-flexible” employment looks like in Europe. It then shows how it challenges the way job quality is conceptualised and measured across six dimensions: terms of employment, pay and rewards, work-life balance, intrinsic work characteristics, health and safety, and representation and voice.
The authors argue for measurement approaches that better capture the effects of these new forms of employment, while keeping job quality as the analytical framework.
The chapter is available here (subscription required): https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-031-88856-4_2-1
Citation: Vanroelen, C., & Leschke, J. (2026). The Study of Job Quality in a Hyper-Flexible Labor Market: Conceptual and Empirical Challenges. In Occupational Health in a New World of Work. Handbook Series in Occupational Health Sciences (pp. 1-26). Springer.
