The world of work is changing. The employment contract, which to a large extent determined the working relationship between employees and employers, is no longer the only means of organizing work. Alternative work arrangements are booming. In the USA, 0.5% of the entire workforce in 2015 was already participating in crowd work via platforms (Katz and Krueger, 2019), while crowd work represents the main employment of 2% of the entire workforce in 14 European countries (Pesole et al., 2018).
Yet the vast majority of management theories are based on traditional, 9-to-5 notions of employment relationships (Cappeli and Keller, 2013). Such a disconnect with empirical realities risks management and organization studies unconsciously ignoring new issues. We seek to evaluate and update the psychological contract, a major management theory, to understand alternative work arrangements.