Vulnerability as a business outcome: Evidence from a Global Platform-Work across Africa, Latin America, and North America

Resumen

Platform-mediated work has become a defining feature of global labor markets, yet research continues to conceptualize worker vulnerability primarily as an individual condition or an unintended by-product of regulatory gaps. Drawing on international business theory, this study reconceptualizes vulnerability as a business outcome of platform internationalization. Following an inductive qualitative research and semi-structured interviews with 30 tutors working on a global online tutoring platform across Latin America, Africa, and North America, the study examines how standardized platform governance mechanisms generate and stabilize vulnerability across heterogeneous institutional contexts. The findings show that platform practices such as unpaid trial work, pricing architectures, ratings-based visibility, and unilateral enforcement systematically externalize economic and social risks onto workers. Vulnerability persists not because workers are unaware of these risks, but because platform-provided economic and organizational advantages such as relative income gains, flexibility, global market access, and purpose-driven work, function as stabilization mechanisms that sustain participation. Latin America emerges as a critical explanatory context where weak institutional buffers and limited labor market alternatives intensify dependence on platform income, rendering vulnerability a durable condition rather than a transitional state. By demonstrating how standardized platform governance interacts with institutional asymmetries to produce uneven vulnerability outcomes, this study advances international business research on gig multinational platforms and highlights the social consequences of scalable global business models in Latin America and beyond.

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