Tethered Freedom: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Meaning, Precarity, and Faith-Based Coping among Ride-Hailing Gig Workers in Gresik, East Java

Abstract

Purpose: This study explores how ride-hailing and food-delivery gig workers in Gresik, East Java, experience and make sense of their work under algorithmic management, and how they construct meaning and cope with pervasive precarity. It responds to the dominance of quantitative and Global-North accounts by centring the lived experience of workers in a religiously embedded, non-metropolitan Indonesian setting.

Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative design grounded in phenomenological inquiry was adopted. Seven informants were selected through purposive sampling and engaged in in-depth, semi-structured interviews supported by field observation. Data were analysed thematically following the descriptive-interpretive phenomenological tradition to distil the essential structure of the lived experience.

Findings: Workers inhabit a condition we term tethered freedom: the celebrated flexibility of platform work is lived simultaneously as autonomy and as self-imposed bondage to the application. Four intertwined themes emerged, namely the ambivalence of freedom, life under an impersonal algorithmic authority, the erosion of the body as working capital, and the arithmetic of precarious income. Two resources render this condition bearable and even meaningful, namely faith-based sensemaking and the fraternity of the basecamp community, which together operate as an informal substitute for the human-resource functions the platform withholds.

Practical implications: Platforms, policymakers, and human-resource scholars are urged to recognise community organisations and faith-based meaning as de facto welfare infrastructure, and to design portable protections, transparent algorithmic governance, and fatigue safeguards that acknowledge the absent employment relationship.

Originality/value: The study advances human-resource scholarship by theorising how workers govern themselves in the absence of an employer, and by foregrounding religious sensemaking and communal solidarity as coping resources rarely examined in secular, metropolitan gig research.

Paper type: Empirical (qualitative, phenomenological).