Nehl frames cultural policymaking as infrastructuring, a concept borrowed from infrastructure theory that foregrounds the invisible, overlooked and taken-for-granted structures facilitating smooth everyday experiences. Infrastructures are never simply there; they are made and held stable through continuous work and changing ways of connecting people and things in socio-material relations. Cultural infrastructure, in this reading, includes buildings, facilities, spaces, practices, funding and legal frameworks, personal and institutional networks as well as social media sites. Nehl adds cultural policy itself to this list, since policy prescribes and shapes cultural practices and thus forms part of infrastructuring as both product and process. The availability of infrastructure components like a discursive policy framework, a building or a social network alone does not turn into supporting infrastructure without the continuous labour of cultural actors that enables involvement in policymaking in the first place.

The study situates CCSC within the architecture of EU cultural governance, where the subsidiary principle has always limited the EU’s role in culture. The Maastricht treaty of 1992 made culture a competency, and the Lisbon treaty of 2007 recognised the cultural and creative industries as a competitive economic factor, legitimising soft intervention through recommendations, guidelines and best practices rather than binding law. Funding programmes like Kaleidoscope, Culture 2000 and, most prominently, Creative Europe support these soft policy tools, with cultural networks acting as intermediaries that connect local actors to the transnational policy level. Policy coordination mechanisms like structured dialogues and the open method of coordination allow more strategic involvement in the cultural sphere, while broad and flexible concepts like creativity accommodate both commercial and non-commercial activity, aligning with the Lisbon agenda.

Yet the agency of cultural actors within these processes remains contested. Independent cultural actors, and especially smaller-scale, alternative actors, identify a tension between their situated perspectives and broader policy framings that risk marginalising the needs of art and cultural production. Policies uninformed by the realities of cultural small-scale producers or less central venues are perceived as ill-fitting, producing irritation and suspicion and ultimately hindering the collaboration that policymakers themselves seek. Research has further traced how networks, initially envisioned as tools for enhancing participatory policymaking, have paradoxically contributed to a form of standardisation that mutes dissent, complicating the political essence of cultural dialogues within the EU.

CCSC was composed of a consortium of eleven non-profit and public organisations, led by Trans Europe Halles, one of the oldest European cultural networks, established in 1983. The project partners included the University of Antwerp, the European Cultural Foundation and Timelab Gent. The methodology was built on the idea of local urban labs, where participating actors define, develop and test new methods and tools. Cultural centres Hablarenarte in Madrid, Ambasada in Timisoara, Kaapeli in Helsinki, the social innovation lab Coboi Lab in Sant Boi de Llobregat, Creative Industries in Kosice, and the public administration City of Lund as well as the cultural administration of the Scania region joined the project. During the three years, the local labs worked on their challenges through twenty-one workshops between May and December 2019, organised traineeships and urban explorations, and exchanged knowledge in policymaking events and a digital conference in early 2021.

To unpack the different stakeholders’ problem representations, Nehl draws on Carol Bacchi’s critical policy methodology entitled What’s the problem represented to be? The WPR approach conceptualises policy not as pregiven problems but as a set of problematisations, addressed through six guiding questions that foreground how power, knowledge and discourse are simultaneously shaped by, and productive of, social worlds. Policy documents are understood as purposefully produced artefacts through which actors seek to represent problems, solutions and roles. Combined with interpretive policy analysis, the approach is sensitive to the perspectives and interpretive frameworks of both analysts and stakeholders, foregrounding the interlinked knowing and doing and advocating for a practice-orientation attentive to how policymakers and administrators act in complex, unpredictable situations. Nehl applied the first, second, fifth and sixth questions primarily, with the fourth question engaged to a smaller but significant degree in the concluding discussion.

The analytical process was an infrastructuring-informed, software-supported abductive coding process. The first rounds of descriptive coding provided an overview and captured all participating actors, revealing actor constellation changes like the P2P foundation leaving for Timelab, a makerspace brought in to assist the methodological aspects of the project. In later coding, closely linked to the WPR questions, the in vivo code art versus system, found in an agenda-setting document from the first CCSC meeting in Brussels, shaped the inquiry. Based on this strong binary construction in the early project data, Nehl continued with versus coding, which serves policy studies attending to conflicts between individuals, groups, social systems, organisations, phenomena, concepts or processes. The coding was further sensitised by actors’ needs to unpack what the different CCSC stakeholders considered infrastructural.

The results reveal that the disconnect between cultural actors and administrative bodies in CCSC is articulated as a gap that occurs between different stakeholders and levels of governance. Whether at the urban, regional or EU level, a gap is palpable between public authorities and local cultural initiatives. Cultural actors report a feeling of distance from the EU institutions, and the lived experience of this distance between policy recommendations and real actions underlines the need for revised methods to include cultural stakeholders in policymaking. The project charter asserted that the gap between citizens and institutions can be narrowed and democratic legitimacy strengthened, positioning the urban labs as spatial solutions to address this widely experienced disconnect. The labs were framed as spaces of encounter where interactive policymaking practices are often the first instance where people who share a particular space actually meet.

However, the analysis exposes how bottom-up demands reverberate around problem formulations of a structural gap while the CCSC project simultaneously highlights a disconnect between EU-level framings of empowerment and the infrastructural needs exemplified by local cultural actors seeking recognition and systemic support for the work they already do. The project recommendations warned that neglecting social rights, precarisation, marginalisation and lack of security in many sectors, including the cultural sector, is a major barrier for participation. Participation was framed as proper labour but without remuneration, and the recommendations cautioned of exclusions affecting people and places lacking political recognition, financial stability or temporal resources, summarised as the cost of participation. In Timisoara, relations with the municipality were described as antagonistic and far from being based on principles of co-creation and participation, while in Sweden two public administration-led labs aimed to strengthen bottom-up participation, facing a reversed dilemma where non-participation was problematised as a lack of space of encounter and empowerment.

The study concludes that future EU cultural policy should more explicitly recognise and support the infrastructural labour that enables soft governance. The discursive sidelining of Trans Europe Halles’ central role as facilitating intermediary and advocate of participating cultural actors raises critical questions about what responsibilities fall on networks acting as intermediaries and what resources they require to fulfil their role as versatile intermediaries. Within the infrastructuring heuristic, it is perhaps not surprising that the work of facilitation remains invisible, especially in officially published reports. Yet the networks’ needs, as well as the risks and benefits entangled in the interdependency of cultural networks with large EU-funded projects, call for attention in further scholarly work, especially since Creative Europe, the most important funding body for networks, can no longer be taken for granted as it is being integrated into the new AgoraEU funding programme for 2028 to 2034. Sustaining bottom-up cultural engagement and democratic participation requires more than empowering EU policy; it calls for enabling frameworks that integrate implicit cultural needs into explicitly social cultural policy frameworks, moving beyond temporary arenas to improve structural conditions for participation, recognition and care.

Subject of Research: Cultural Policy Research

Article Title: Infrastructuring cultural policy: the case of Creative Europe’s “Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities”

Article References: Nehl, M. (2026). Infrastructuring cultural policy: the case of Creative Europe’s “Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities”. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 15478. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.15478

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.15478

Keywords: cultural policy, Creative Europe, cultural networks, infrastructuring, soft governance, participation, precarity, Trans Europe Halles, discourse analysis, EU policymaking, cultural, policy

The study, published in Frontiers in Sociology, examined how gig workers in Johannesburg experience what the researchers call legislative exclusion: the process through which state action constitutes a category of workers as falling outside the scope of labor law. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten platform workers spanning e-hailing, delivery, digital freelancing and social media content creation, and analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, the research offers an interpretive account of how political and economic processes — usually treated as separate domains — combine to shape working lives.

The analytical starting point is deliberately counterintuitive. Much scholarship on platform labor in the global South frames the problem as regulatory absence: where the state has not legislated for platform work, workers are classified as independent contractors and fall outside protective law. The remedy, on that view, is simply to legislate. South Africa unsettles this assumption. Section 23 of the Constitution entrenches fair labor practices; the Labor Relations Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act establish extensive protections; sections 200A and 83A install a rebuttable presumption of employment; and the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration provides accessible adjudication. Platform workers stand outside every one of these instruments — not because the regulatory state is missing, but because of how a well-developed one draws and maintains the boundary of the employment relationship.

The researchers identify four processes through which this exclusion is produced. The first is definitional: the statutory definition of an employee in section 213 of the Labor Relations Act, applied through the dominant impression test, places platform work outside the protective scope by ordinary interpretation rather than by any dedicated legislative act. The second is jurisdictional and corporate. In a 2018 Labor Court case involving Uber, the court set aside a ruling that drivers were employees of the local entity, holding that local and Netherlands-based entities had been improperly conflated — and declined to determine whether they were employees of the foreign parent. Exclusion was produced procedurally, through the question of which entity could be cited, without any determination on the merits.

The third process is the most striking illustration that exclusion is actively made rather than merely absent. The National Land Transport Amendment Act, gazetted in June 2024 and brought into operation in September 2025, recognizes e-hailing as a distinct category of public transport, requires operating licenses, and imposes vehicle branding and panic-button obligations. Compliance costs fell on individual driver-operators, and the employment relationship is nowhere addressed. The researchers describe this as regulation without recognition: the state constitutes the driver as a licensed transport operator and, in the same instrument, confirms that the driver is not a worker. The fourth process is discursive — platform work is officially framed as entrepreneurship and job creation, positioning regulatory restraint as the protection of opportunity in a context of mass unemployment.

These processes do not bear on all gig workers equally. The study distinguishes between location-based work — e-hailing and delivery — which is geographically tethered, capital-intensive for the worker, and in principle regulable by the national state, and remote online work — freelancing and content creation — which is contracted across borders and mediated by clients and monetization programs rather than dispatch algorithms. The transport regulation reaches location-based drivers alone; remote online workers are addressed by no domestic instrument at all. For freelancers and content creators, the counterparty is frequently a client in another country or a foreign monetization program, so there is often no local entity to cite and no forum in which any claim could be entertained.

The lived consequences differ accordingly. Location-based participants described unreviewable deactivation — account suspensions without warning, hearing, or appeal — alongside the transfer of vehicle, fuel, maintenance and now licensing costs onto the worker. One e-hailing driver told the researchers: “We drivers are disposable. A customer complains, Uber acts fast with no warning, no hearing. We have no protection.” Online participants described a different configuration: client non-payment, unenforceable informal agreements, unpaid speculative pitching, and dependence on ranking, reach and monetization criteria that are neither published nor contestable. A content creator recounted an agreement with no written contract that ended with no money received.

Both segments reported unbounded working time, though in different registers. E-hailing and delivery participants described working up to sixteen hours a day to earn what they considered a decent income, pushing themselves through illness because missing a day means losing income permanently, and accumulating fatigue that they linked directly to road accidents. Online participants described a working day extended across evenings, weekends and time zones — with client communication, revision requests and continuous posting schedules, and with considerable labor performed speculatively and remunerated not at all. In both cases, the researchers read the absence of a socially guaranteed boundary around the working day as a structural condition rather than a personal preference: the limits the Basic Conditions of Employment Act places on ordinary hours, rest periods and paid sick leave do not merely protect individuals, they place part of the cost of illness and fatigue on employers and the state. Where that boundary is absent, the limit on working time is set by the worker’s body and by the earnings required to survive.

The study also documents how exclusion compounds over time. Without payslips, contracts or verifiable income, participants cannot satisfy the documentary requirements of credit, insurance and tenancy — so exclusion from labor law becomes exclusion from financial and social citizenship. Neither segment is covered by unemployment insurance or compensation for occupational injuries, and neither receives any employer contribution to retirement or medical provision. Participants described self-insuring against illness, injury and old age, with little capacity to save. The researchers argue that this is a structural arrangement rather than a series of unfortunate events: access to work is held at the discretion of an entity that is not, in law, an employer, and can be withdrawn without reasons, notice or hearing, while the worker’s dependence is total.

Reform is now on the table. In February 2026, the Minister of Employment and Labor published draft labor law amendments following negotiations at the National Economic Development and Labor Council, including expanded statutory definitions of employer and employee, a strengthened presumption of employment capable of reaching digital platform workers, and a new framework for on-call and zero-hours arrangements. The researchers caution, however, that a presumption of employment operates by identifying an employer — and would most readily reach platforms directing location-based work within South Africa, while leaving freelancers and content creators, whose counterparties are dispersed foreign clients and advertisers, substantially where they stand. Their broader argument is that the boundary of the employment relationship is the operative site of both exclusion and any prospective inclusion, and that remedies must be assessed against which segment of platform labor they can actually reach — whether through presumptions of employment, payment-protection duties on marketplaces, social security detached from employment status, or enforceable duties of algorithmic transparency. What participants described, the study concludes, was not a wish to see platform work abolished, but a claim to protection, to reasons for the decisions that shape their livelihoods, and to a forum in which those decisions can be contested.

Subject of Research: Legislative exclusion and precarity among gig workers in South Africa's platform economy

Article Title: Exploring the impact of legislative absences on the working environment of gig workers in South Africa

Article References: Gwele, Z., Mabaso, C., & Knight, X. (2026). Exploring the impact of legislative absences on the working environment of gig workers in South Africa. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1824697. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1824697

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1824697

Keywords: gig economy, legislative exclusion, platform capitalism, algorithmic management, precarity, South Africa, labor law, e-hailing, freelancing, content creation, job insecurity, dispute resolution

The study, led by Katharine Sarikakis and colleagues at the University of Vienna’s Department of Communication, was conducted within the REBOOT project on European film competitiveness, funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. Participants came from Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Ukraine, and worked across directing, producing, editing, screenwriting, acting and film promotion. The researchers combined focus groups and semi-structured interviews, each lasting 40 to 60 minutes and producing 295 pages of transcription, with a short survey to map demographic patterns. The analysis followed an inductive thematic approach, and the team was deliberately reflexive about its own position: three of the five researchers fall within the same age bracket as their participants, and one is a young filmmaker herself.

What emerged from the transcripts is a portrait of an industry whose entry points are governed less by merit than by access to financial capital and informal networks. Over half of the respondents cited involvement in independent projects and on-the-job learning or apprenticeships as their primary route into the industry, while only 11 participants had formal film education as their point of contact. When asked about initial support, 19 of the 27 said they had relied on family or friends, and 15 on industry networking opportunities. Just three participants had obtained governmental funding or grants. The pattern is stark: the resources that should, in principle, be distributed through public policy are in practice distributed through private relationships and personal wealth.

The interviews document the human cost of this filtering with uncomfortable precision. One director described waiting nearly five years after graduation for her first directing job, recalling that during her studies “the worst fears of nobody being interested simply came true.” A producer described working in a supermarket after finishing his degree and only finding a foothold in the industry when a post-pandemic production boom opened temporary gaps. An editor reported that peers on university internships earned 420 or 450 euros at best, and that most were not paid at all. Others described working days of 10 to 16 hours without compensation that covered basic living expenses, treating exhaustion as the entry fee to a career.

The most quoted voice in the study belongs to a producer who identifies as autistic and who gave the paper its title. “I feel like I slip through the cracks,” he said. “The criteria are so tight. For example, there is support for non-academics—that is not me. There are many programmes for women—that is not me either. Diversity and minorities are considered, and I present myself as an autistic filmmaker, but there is no lobby for that yet, at least not in my country. I honestly do not know how I can finance my work.” The researchers read this not as an anomaly but as evidence that current diversity frameworks lack the nuance to address intersectional identities, leaving individuals who fall between categories without any route to support.

That sense of falling between categories extends to the funding architecture itself. The European Union operates an elaborate apparatus for the audiovisual sector: the Creative Europe programme and its MEDIA strand, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive requiring on-demand platforms to carry at least 30 percent European works, the Cinema Communication allowing member states to fund culturally significant works, and the Media and Audiovisual Action Plan launched in December 2020. Between 2016 and 2019, direct public funding accounted for an average of 26.3 percent of European film budgets, and 91.7 percent of films received some form of direct public sponsorship. Yet the young filmmakers in the study described Creative Europe funding as perceived to be intended for bigger productions, its application procedures opaque and its co-financing requirements prohibitive. “The requirements are crazy, and it’s scary, so it repels people from attempting to get those funding,” one young producer said. “As a young producer, all I want is just a place where I can go, I say, this is what I have, this is the message I want to show, how can you help?”

The data on remuneration reinforce the picture. Among audiovisual directors in Europe aged under 35, less than 20 percent had received full remuneration for project development, less than 30 percent for pre-production, and less than 20 percent for promotion, according to figures cited in the study. Among emerging screenwriters, only around 20 percent were fully paid for project development and roughly 10 percent for writing on their own initiative. Previous research cited by the authors found that over 80 percent of young creatives had performed unpaid labour within a two-year research period, a considerable share of it illegal. Against this backdrop, the study’s finding that 19 of 27 participants regarded unpaid internships or low-pay opportunities as necessary stepping stones—while simultaneously naming financial constraints as their biggest challenge—illustrates how thoroughly such conditions have been normalised as an unquestionable component of career progression.

The researchers frame this normalisation through the concept of precarity under post-Fordist labour regimes, in which the risks of freelance, project-based work are shifted entirely onto the individual. The “catch-22” their participants describe—needing connections to get work, but needing work to build connections—is, they argue, not a logistical accident but a structural mechanism of exclusion that reproduces the dominance of white, middle-class men in the screen industries, a pattern documented in both European and Hollywood contexts. Female participants described gendered power dynamics on set, feeling intimidated in technical roles, and being hired to satisfy gender expectations while men still secured the large-budget productions. “If you look at who does the big budget film in this country, it is still the men,” one director said. “I think you get projects but not the same projects that men get.”

The study also documents a persistent disjuncture between policy intention and lived experience. EU initiatives nominally aim to support emerging talent and diversity, and Creative Europe co-funded 16 platforms highlighting emerging artists between 2021 and 2023, paying over 1,000 artists for around 7,000 days of work between 2017 and 2020. Yet participants reported that national funds, where they existed, were more accessible than European ones, and that citizenship or residency requirements created funding disparities between countries and restricted cross-border collaboration. Some called for smaller, less bureaucratic grants of around 50,000 euros specifically for emerging filmmakers and pan-European productions; others asked for diversity quotas, youth representation on funding committees, mentorship programmes and film education in schools. One participant argued the EU should foster “artistic innovation, rather than wide audiences and profit-oriented productions.”

The authors’ conclusion is deliberately pointed: public policy and funding mechanisms alone will not fix a system whose problems are rooted in industry practice. They argue the film sector should treat emerging talent as its future leaders, with advancement guided by creative vision rather than a strictly linear climb based on age and experience, and they warn that if “life-friendly” conditions do not materialise, talented people will simply leave. The stakes extend beyond individual careers. Young audiences, research suggests, prefer authentic storytelling that showcases diverse voices, and a homogenised industry risks growing detached from the very audiences it needs to survive. Without targeted governance reforms that simplify access and address intersectional barriers, the study warns, the European film industry will keep filtering out the diverse worldviews that make its output worth watching—leaving a generation of skilled filmmakers, in the words of one participant, to conclude that “in the end, it all comes down to money.”

Subject of Research: Governance gaps and precarity among young filmmakers entering the European film industry

Article Title: “I feel like I slip through the cracks”: governance gaps and the precarity of young filmmakers in Europe

Article References: Sarikakis, K., Chatziefraimidou, A., Haslauer, S., Ramadani, G., & Yeroshkina, M. (2026). “I feel like I slip through the cracks”: governance gaps and the precarity of young filmmakers in Europe. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16374. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16374

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16374

Keywords: young filmmakers, European film industry, precarity, Creative Europe, film funding, governance gaps, cultural industries, meritocracy, diversity, unpaid labour, intersectionality, University of Vienna

The stakes are high because the independent sector has become indispensable to Austria’s cultural life. Emerging from the cultural democracy movements of the 1980s and sustained by public funding, small and mid-sized non-profit organisations specialised in contemporary, discursive and participatory formats that the major institutions and folklore circuits rarely produce. Yet the sector’s cultural relevance has always coexisted with economic fragility. The dominant funding logic distributes support through project grants, often described as the watering can principle, spreading resources thinly across many applicants. That model conditions bogus self-employment, unstable incomes, hybrid professional roles and multiple jobholding, which have hardened into defining characteristics of the sector rather than occasional exceptions.

The consequences compound over a lifetime. Austria introduced artists’ social insurance in 1983 and mandatory coverage for the so-called new self-employed in 1998, but that scheme covers health, accident and pension contributions while excluding unemployment insurance and continued payments during illness. Multiple and seasonal employment frequently triggers double contributions without accumulating benefits, and low pensions leave the sector’s pioneering generation facing poverty in old age. The 2010 Theatre Employment Act promised improvement, but its implementation in the independent scene remained partial because of double insurance burdens, limited budgets and high ancillary wage costs. Interest groups have advocated fair pay for three decades, and the new study treats their persistence as evidence that the problem is structural, not behavioural.

The reform itself unfolded in stages. Fair pay entered the 2019 government agreement, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the sector’s lack of reserves, acted as a catalyst. In 2020 the Federal Ministry launched the Fairness Process with sectoral interest groups, grounded in collaborative governance and articulated through a Fairness Code and the principle of voluntary commitment. A nationwide survey of the fair pay gap followed in 2021, and in 2022 the federal authorities adopted a Fair Pay Strategy that acknowledges shared responsibility across federal, state and municipal levels. Between the 2022 pilot phase and 2024, the earmarked support programme grew from 6.5 million euros to 10 million euros, signalling incremental fiscal consolidation even as the broader framework remained non-mandatory.

The core instrument is technically elegant. It consists of an earmarked support programme, open to artists and cultural organisations alongside traditional funding, in which applicants submit standardised data forms documenting the gap between actual and fair remuneration so that the difference can be covered. To operationalise fair pay in an unregulated and highly diverse working environment, interest groups produced discipline- and profession-specific salary schemes for employees and fee guidelines for freelance work, which funding authorities disseminate as normative reference points. The deliberate choice of the term fee guidelines rather than fee schedules is designed to deflect potential accusations of anti-competitive agreements in occupational fields classified as liberal trades, a legal tension that European research and advocacy have long flagged.

The Austrian model contrasts sharply with the Dutch benchmark that the authors use for comparison. The Netherlands makes fair pay mandatory for organisations in covered sub-sectors and for municipalities as subsidy providers, and it rests on a collective agreement. Austria’s approach relies on voluntary commitment, which the study identifies as a decisive weakness. Fragmented governance and non-binding measures prevent the gap from closing uniformly: implementation varies in commitment, timing and fiscal contribution across Austria’s federal layers, producing asynchronous rollout, incomplete gap closure through uneven co-financing and limited participation in rural municipalities, where remuneration gaps are often highest. Obliging municipal mandates, the authors argue, would reduce precisely these disparities.

Politics intrudes as well. Because cultural affairs fall to the state governments, the right-wing FPÖ in one Austrian state has opposed implementing Fair Pay on the grounds that folklore should take priority in grant-making. The study notes that this position disregards the distinct paradigms of voluntary engagement in collective cultural practices versus professional cultural labour, as well as Austria’s ratification in 2006 of the UNESCO Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The episode illustrates how fair pay reform, even when fiscally modest, becomes entangled with contested visions of what public cultural funding is for.

Measurement problems compound the governance ones. Austria’s cultural statistics do not systematically differentiate between public and private non-profit employment structures, nor do they comprehensively register independent initiatives, leaving the sector unclassified, underexplored and only partially visible. Those gaps contaminated the Fair Pay Gap survey itself: missing population data and biased sampling led to misrepresentation, so the survey captures only large-scale trends in pay disparities while the policy operates on an incomplete empirical infrastructure. The authors argue that understanding a hybrid labour market characterised by precarious conditions requires comprehensive data collection and transparency about the realities of cultural work, without which reform cannot be calibrated or evaluated.

Perhaps the deepest constraint is that cultural funding, labour law and welfare policy operate as an interconnected system. Recent restrictions on supplementary earnings during unemployment disproportionately hit the arts and culture sector, where multiple jobholding and hybrid roles are structurally embedded, and may undermine both cultural sustainability and the efficiency of public expenditure. Meanwhile, a sector-wide shift away from project-based funding toward genuine employment would require expanding employment law and significantly increasing cultural budgets, to an extent the authors describe as currently unrealistic; multi-year subsidy agreements were even temporarily suspended under national austerity measures. Alternative pathways, such as collaborative sectoral organisation and cross-sector partnerships developed jointly with the field, might reduce systemic dependence on project grants while preserving diversity in programming.

The lessons the authors draw reach well beyond Austria. They call for harmonised standards across territorial authorities, mandatory municipal fair pay requirements on the Dutch model, adequate statistical visibility for the independent sector, and stronger interest-group representation, which in Austria has been critical to building the sector for decades even while the interest groups themselves face a high pay gap. At the transnational level, they point to a European status for artists and cultural professionals to standardise employment protections, public goods principles that recognise cultural labour markets as distinct, cultural awareness clauses in other policy domains, and the push to include culture among the Sustainable Development Goals. Narrative framing matters too: social impact analysis, refined since J. M. Schindler’s pioneering 2012 proposal, can generate credible evidence of the societal contribution of arts and culture, and reframing public cultural expenditure as societal investment rather than subsidy could secure more durable political support. For now, Austria’s higher incomes and preserved diversity of offerings look like genuine progress, but the study’s central message is that fair pay is not an income correction. It is a systemic transformation, and it succeeds only when fiscal commitment is matched by governance coordination, good data, cross-domain awareness and enforceable European frameworks.

Subject of Research: Fair pay policy implementation and precarity in Austria's independent arts and culture sector

Article Title: Doing fair pay. Implications from the Austrian experience

Article References: Teissl, V., & Unnold, Y. (2026). Doing fair pay. Implications from the Austrian experience. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16458. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16458

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16458

Keywords: fair pay, cultural policy, Austria, independent arts sector, precarity, artists' status, cultural funding, social protection, interest groups, UNESCO, European cultural policy, non-profit cultural organisations

The research arrives at a moment when “caring communities” have become a buzzword in social policy across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, often invoked as a vision for aging societies in which family, market, and state provision all fall short. Saltiel and Strüver argue that most of this debate focuses on top-down, formally organized local care networks, while overlooking the countless self-organized initiatives — community kitchens, homeless support, refugee hosting, shared childcare — that emerge from below out of sheer necessity. These “shadow care infrastructures,” as other scholars have termed them, respond to the unequal distribution of care resources, yet they are rarely treated as more than stopgaps for failed welfare regimes.

To build their framework, the authors bring two theoretical traditions into dialogue that rarely speak to each other. From Judith Butler they take the distinction between precariousness and precarity: the insight that all humans are fundamentally interdependent and vulnerable — a shared existential condition — while political and economic structures distribute that vulnerability unequally, exposing particular groups to violence, exclusion, and abandonment. From Joan Tronto they draw the ethics of care and the concept of “caring with,” the idea that because everyone begins and ends life dependent on others, the allocation of care responsibilities must be negotiated collectively rather than left to families, markets, or institutions. Situated within a post-structural materialist framework, this synthesis links macro-level inequality to micropolitical practices of everyday life.

The empirical heart of the study comes from six years of qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels, conducted by Saltiel between 2016 and 2022. She examined two initiatives coordinated by the Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés, a civil society platform with more than 15,000 volunteers. The first was the informal camp in Maximilian Park, where asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, students, church groups, pensioners, and managers alike built and sustained a temporary settlement. The second was Hébergement, launched via Facebook in autumn 2017, which matched precarious migrants — many of them undocumented and therefore excluded from state reception — with private households willing to host them.

The scale of Hébergement is striking. More than 10,000 households have hosted homeless migrants since 2017, providing roughly 50,000 overnight stays in its first year and nearly 100,000 in the following one. What began as a one-night gesture frequently evolved into longer stays and durable personal relationships. Hosts and guests shopped, cooked, ate, and washed dishes together; they cared for each other during illness, looked after children, and took responsibility for homes, plants, and pets. Participants often described one another in familial terms — hosts addressed as “Mama,” or relationships described as sibling-like — a linguistic move that redefined what “family” and “stranger” could mean.

In the camp, meanwhile, the authors observed how care roles dissolved rather than reinforced the familiar dichotomy between “generous citizens” and “passive, grateful supplicants.” Volunteers were marked by yellow safety vests, and residents of the camp itself — including asylum seekers and undocumented migrants — became volunteers in their own right, running a kitchen and organizing food rescue. One collective of undocumented migrants wrote “Sans-Papiers” on their vests in black marker, a performative assertion of their presence and their role as care providers. Community membership, the authors argue, was produced through the act of caring itself rather than through any criteria of exclusion, forming what they call an “alliance of cohabitation.”

Language itself became a site of political intervention. In the Facebook groups of the Plateforme Citoyenne, volunteers coined the term VNOUS, fusing the French “vous” (you) and “nous” (we) into a single word that blurred the boundary between helper and helped. The neologism spread into the platform’s official communication and even became the title of a 2019 documentary. The authors read this as more than symbolism: naming practices, like the familial terms used in hosted households, are performative acts that rework belonging and challenge racist and nationalist constructions of “us” and “them,” even if such linguistic shifts alone cannot dismantle structural inequality.

The study is careful not to romanticize. The authors note that these communities remain ambivalent and fragile. The high visibility of the camp in a public park generated political pressure on local government, whereas Hébergement moved the problem of unprovided-for people into private homes, rendering it invisible and potentially relieving policymakers of responsibility — a dynamic that echoes critiques of the informalization and deprofessionalization of care work. Paternalistic patterns, in which helpers demand proof of “deservingness” from the helped, can also reappear within volunteer initiatives. The authors insist that such ambivalences are not arguments against these communities, but reminders that they operate within, and against, existing power relations.

What the Brussels cases ultimately demonstrate, Saltiel and Strüver argue, is that community is not a precondition for care but one of its products. These “other caring communities” define themselves not by boundary-drawing or homogenization but by the mutual recognition of shared precariousness and interdependence — what Butler calls a politics of alliance and what the activist collective Precarias a la Deriva termed an affective citizenship bound to care rather than to the nation-state. They are agile and fragile at once, temporary yet transformative, renegotiating social relations and experimenting with forms of togetherness beyond capitalist, familial, and institutional arrangements.

The authors close with a call to treat other caring communities not merely as a social policy concern but as an epistemic perspective — a lens that connects micro-practices of everyday care to macro-structural conditions and expands debates on welfare, provision, and socio-spatial justice. Key open questions remain: whether such improvised arrangements will harden into lasting care infrastructures or remain temporary responses to acute crises, and how gendered, racialized, and classed power relations are reproduced or disrupted within them. In a world of deepening care crises, the everyday practice of strangers caring with one another may be less a utopia than a live experiment in how societies could be organized differently.

Subject of Research: The formation of self-organized caring communities among refugees and volunteers in Brussels

Article Title: Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens

Article References: Saltiel, R., & Strüver, A. (2026). Sorgende Gemeinschaften: Performative Praxis des Miteinander-Sorgens. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 481-496. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-481-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-481-2026

Keywords: caring communities, ethics of care, precarity, refugee support, Brussels, volunteering, social reproduction, care crisis, performativity, feminist geography, mutual aid, informal care

The scale of the phenomenon is considerable. India is the region’s largest hub, with a gig workforce of roughly 7.7 million that the government think tank NITI Aayog projects will reach 23.5 million by 2029–30. Bangladesh holds the second-largest gig workforce in South Asia, while in Sri Lanka platform work functions mainly as a supplementary income source within the informal economy. Pakistan’s online gig work accounts for 2.9 percent of total employment, and the overwhelming majority of those workers, 97.1 percent, are engaged in physical, platform-based activities rather than remote digital tasks. According to a 2025 report by the International Labour Organization, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan together account for nearly half of the world’s platform workers. These figures place South Asia at the centre of a global transformation in how work is organised, mediated, and remunerated.

The economics of platform labour reveal a sharp asymmetry between corporate revenue and worker earnings. The review notes that Zomato alone earned Rs 2,604 crores, about 27.2 million US dollars, in the 2019–20 financial year, and that both Zomato and Swiggy roughly doubled their turnover between 2018–19 and 2019–20. Yet after deducting fuel costs, vehicle loan instalments, and other fixed expenses, food delivery partners in India net approximately Rs 275, or about 2.86 US dollars, per day for eight hours of work. Platforms describe themselves as intermediaries or passive matchmakers and classify workers as independent contractors or partners, a terminology the authors identify as a deliberate strategy to negate the employer–employee relationship and thereby avoid the application of labour law. In practice, platforms retain control over terms and conditions, wages, and performance monitoring, exercising the authority of an employer without bearing its legal obligations.

At the technical heart of this control lies algorithmic management. Customer satisfaction metrics, delivery pace, and service quality are continuously monitored by software systems that rank workers, and those rankings are then used to justify dismissing those labelled as underperforming. Researchers cited in the review describe Uber’s reliance on two forms of algorithmic control: gatekeeping, which screens and monitors who may work, and guiding, which directs how drivers perform their tasks. Algorithmic pay determination, surge pricing, and performance rewards generate pronounced income volatility, forcing workers into contingent, task-based remuneration arrangements. Identification deactivation has become a recurrent disciplinary tool across the region, often applied through opaque and discretionary processes that workers find difficult to understand or contest. The platform design encourages competition and isolation among workers, producing what some scholars call a digital cage that discourages solidarity and collective action, even as workers may perceive themselves as free and self-directed entrepreneurs.

The human costs are severe and increasingly visible. In early January 2026, a Zepto delivery worker in Hyderabad died while rushing to pick up an order under the pressure of ten-minute food and grocery delivery promises. The review records that this was neither the first such death nor likely the last, as workers speed to meet deadlines that directly affect their ratings and efficiency. In Pakistan, the Fairwork assessment of seven platforms spanning ride-hailing, food delivery, e-commerce delivery, and personal care highlights risks ranging from road safety to crime and violence. In Bangladesh, a female worker on the hellotask platform reported that despite relatively better salary and flexibility, access to basic facilities such as sanitation during menstruation, meals, medicines, and childcare depended on maintaining a good relationship with the customer. Nepali gig workers, particularly women, cite flexibility as their main reason for entering the sector, yet the country lacks any legal definition of gig workers, leaving their employment status ambiguous. Sri Lankan workers face intense surveillance, harsh climatic conditions, and the absence of social security provisions.

The theoretical framework of precarity gives these observations analytical coherence. The concept originates with Pierre Bourdieu, who described an existence with no regular timetable, no fixed place of work, and a whole life lived under the sign of the provisional. Judith Butler extended the idea, defining precarity as politically induced conditions in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. The authors argue that gig work exemplifies this politically induced character: the insecurity is not merely a by-product of individual platforms but a structural outcome of neoliberal labour restructuring, in which states have curtailed welfare provisions and normalised casual, short-term, and intermittent labour. Crucially, the review finds that technologically mediated precarity overlaps with and intensifies pre-existing social hierarchies of caste, gender, poverty, and religion, positioning platforms as new digital gatekeepers of inequality.

Against these odds, gig workers have organised. In India, unions such as the United Food Delivery Partners’ Union, the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers, and the All India Gig Workers Union have staged protests and collective actions against wage cuts, rising fuel prices, and declining incentives. In Pakistan, groups including the United Platform Workers of Sindh and the Informal Workers Coalition advocate for safety, social security, wage transparency, and an end to algorithmic surveillance. In Bangladesh, traditional unions have supported the Dhaka Ride-sharing Driver Union in demanding an end to police harassment, recognition of app-based riders as workers, a commission reduction from 25 to 10 percent, and tax exemptions. Digital tools are central to this mobilisation: WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and social media campaigns coordinate strikes, share grievances, and connect workers across geographies. In Hyderabad, personal care workers on the Urban Company platform have built WhatsApp networks that function as whisper networks, warning one another about abusive customers and circulating information about company policies, an informal justice mechanism foregrounding caste, class, and customer–worker power dynamics.

These struggles have begun to yield policy results, though unevenly. India’s Code on Social Security 2020 was the first law in the region to officially recognise gig workers as a distinct category eligible for social security benefits, though critics point to uncertainties in its implementation. At the sub-national level, the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Bill of 2024 aims to institutionalise registration and welfare mechanisms, while the Tamil Nadu Platform Based Gig Workers’ Welfare Board, established in 2023, has subsidised e-scooter purchases for 2,000 registered workers and created an insurance programme offering up to Rs 5 lakh for accidental death or total disability, funded by an annual premium of just Rs 105 per worker. The Karnataka Platform-based Gig Workers Bill of 2025 goes further, proposing a 1 to 5 percent welfare fee on aggregators and a dedicated welfare board covering more than four lakh workers across ride-sharing, delivery, logistics, healthcare, and hospitality. In Pakistan, the Centre for Labour Research, working with the Fairwork project, has drafted a Platform Workers Protection Bill seeking to extend enforceable labour protections beyond the independent contractor classification. Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka still lack dedicated legislation for gig workers.

The review also draws attention to gendered dimensions of exclusion. India has approximately 4.75 million domestic workers on official records, most of them economically vulnerable women, yet no comprehensive national legislation protects them, despite state-level efforts in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Delhi. Women in gig work face distinct challenges balancing unpredictable schedules with childcare and caregiving responsibilities, and the president of the Gig and Platform Service Workers Union reported facing exploitation, threats of police action, and legal notices after raising complaints. Nevertheless, women workers have actively led mobilisations, including nationwide protests demanding fair wages and social security. The authors conclude that collective worker voice, even in constrained institutional environments, can shape regulatory discourse and public accountability, and they call for reframing the legal category of employee to include gig workers, or creating an expanded worker category with a basic range of workplace rights.

The broader significance of the study lies in its demonstration that platform-mediated precarity reproduces cycles of income volatility, debt exposure, and structural dependency that existing labour law was never designed to address. The authors argue that effective legislative reform must be coupled with institutional oversight and accountability mechanisms, portable social security entitlements, and statutorily enforceable labour standards. They note that platforms consistently resist standardised wages and protections by claiming such measures would undermine flexibility, yet their absence entrenches informality and regulatory arbitrage. While platform cooperatives have been proposed as an alternative model, the authors observe that operational costs and technical constraints limit their viability, and that workers are primarily fighting not for a share of the platforms but for rights, recognition, fair treatment, algorithmic transparency, and welfare policy. For South Asia’s rapidly expanding digital workforce, the trajectory from informal exclusion to formal protection, the review suggests, will depend on whether states match the organising energy of workers with substantive law and rigorous enforcement.

Subject of Research: Precarity, informality, and social security policy for gig and platform workers in South Asia

Article Title: Social (in)security and social policy for gig workers in South Asia

Article References: Pankaj, A. K., & Jha, M. K. (2026). Social (in)security and social policy for gig workers in South Asia. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 205. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00579-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00579-0

Keywords: gig economy, platform workers, South Asia, precarity, algorithmic management, social security, informal labour, labour rights, India, unionisation, social policy, digital labour