Faculty: Lilo Altali
Program: Doctor of Professional Studies (DPS)
Contribution: Book Chapter — Navigating Platform-Mediated Labor: A Mixed-Method Exploration of Worker Identity, Autonomy, and Governance
Published in: Value Creation in Digital Platforms and Business Ecosystems (Routledge, 2026)
Read the chapter: taylorfrancis.com

Lilo Altali is an adjunct faculty member in Northeastern’s Doctor of Professional Studies program, where he teaches innovation and product development. His background sits at the intersection of product design and organizational theory. He is interested not just in how products work, but in how they shape the people who use them. That question led him to gig work. In digital labor platforms, product design isn’t neutral: ratings, algorithms, incentive structures, and interface choices actively define how workers experience autonomy, identity, and control. Altali’s research takes that observation seriously as a scholarly problem.

His most recent contribution is a chapter in Value Creation in Digital Platforms and Business Ecosystems (Routledge, 2026), a peer-reviewed volume examining how digital platforms are reshaping organizations, labor, and value creation across industries. The chapter, “Navigating Platform-Mediated Labor: A Mixed-Method Exploration of Worker Identity, Autonomy, and Governance,” uses a mixed-methods approach to examine how gig workers on platforms like Uber and Upwork understand their own relationship to the systems they work through. The finding that emerges is both straightforward and consequential: the legal binary of “employee” versus “independent contractor” flattens experiences that are, in practice, far more varied and far more revealing.

The Challenge

There is a growing and consequential gap between the realities of platform-mediated work and the frameworks (legal, organizational, and academic) we use to make sense of it. Policy conversations tend to force workers into one of two boxes. But gig workers themselves rarely experience their work that way.

What actually shapes their sense of identity, autonomy, and belonging? How do digital gig workers construct meaning within systems that are highly algorithmic, structurally ambiguous, and designed to obscure the power relationships at play? These are not abstract questions. They have direct implications for policy, for platform design, and for how we think about the future of work. Altali’s research takes the workers’ own experience as the primary analytical lens, because that is where the real story lives.

Altali’s research was inspired by a central question in product design: how do design choices shape the way users understand themselves within a product? Digital labor platforms offered a powerful setting to explore this question because they are not simply tools workers use. They are designed environments that influence how workers experience autonomy, trust, control, and belonging.

Altali is drawn to research that challenges how policy systems define and categorize people’s experiences, especially when those categories do not fully capture how people understand themselves. In gig work, design choices such as ratings, algorithms, profiles, incentives, and platform rules shape whether workers see themselves as entrepreneurs, as employees, or as something else entirely. This research examines how those product-mediated experiences shape identity, trust, and the meaning of work in a platform economy.

“Gig workers are not a monolithic group. Different platform design choices produce very different worker experiences and that distinction matters enormously for policy, product design, and the future of labor.”

Lilo Altali, CPS Adjunct Faculty, Doctor of Professional Studies Program

Impact & Outcomes

Altali has already presented aspects of this research internationally, including at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) in Milan and at the Future of Work Institute in Perth, Australia. Those conversations have deepened his thinking about how platform governance questions are playing out across very different national and cultural contexts.

The chapter appears alongside contributions from researchers across disciplines and institutions, all examining how digital platforms are reshaping organizations, labor, and value creation. That interdisciplinary grounding is part of what makes this line of inquiry consequential. It cannot be answered by any single field alone.

Connection to CPS

This work connects directly to Altali’s teaching within the Doctor of Professional Studies (DPS) program at CPS, where he teaches innovation and product development. In the classroom, he asks students to examine not only whether a product works, but how design choices shape user behavior, identity, trust, and decision-making. His research on gig platforms brings those questions into sharper focus by showing how products can structure the way people understand themselves and their work. For DPS students, who are themselves practitioner-scholars navigating complex organizations and systems, this kind of research models what it looks like to take a real-world problem seriously as an object of scholarly inquiry. Altali’s work shows how innovation and product design can be studied not only as technical or market activities, but as forces that shape identity, trust, autonomy, and institutional change.

Connect with Lilo on LinkedIn.