Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the “sharing,” “gig,” or “on-demand” economy, which has been changing the relationships between customers, workers, and companies. While literature on the gig economy in the Western context abounds, few studies have focused on “digitalized” labor relations in the Central Asian context.

Drawing on qualitative field research in Kazakhstan in 2016 and 2021, supplemented by quantitative data, this article contributes to debates about labor relations and the digitalized “gig” economy in a non-Western context. It provides a novel, in-depth, multisource account of the structure of platform-based business and work experiences in the digitally enabled Kazakh gig economy. Using ethnographic evidence, we offer a detailed analysis of labor conditions from the perspective of platform-based companies and gig workers, identifying resistance and “survival” strategies used to navigate and even challenge the existing system characterized by “algorithmic management” or “algorithm-based” labor relations.

近年来，人们对“共享”、“零工”或“按需”经济的兴趣高涨，这正在改变客户、工人和公司之间的关系。尽管有关西方背景下零工经济的文献比比皆是，但很少有研究关注中亚背景下的“数字化”劳动关系。

本文借鉴 2016 年和 2021 年在哈萨克斯坦进行的定性实地研究，并辅以定量数据，为非西方背景下有关劳动关系和数字化“零工”经济的辩论做出了贡献。它为数字化哈萨克斯坦零工经济中基于平台的业务和工作体验的结构提供了新颖、深入、多源的描述。利用人种学证据，我们从基于平台的公司和零工工人的角度对劳动条件进行了详细分析，确定了用于导航甚至挑战以“算法管理”或“算法管理”为特征的现有系统的阻力和“生存”策略。为基础的“劳动关系”。