Being Your Own Chef. Are Digital Platforms a Professional Emancipation Vehicle for Expert Service Workers?

This article examines the extent to which digital platforms are a professional emancipation vehicle for expert service workers providing personalized services. It focuses on the case of a personal chef platform to investigate its emancipatory effect for cooks seeking to escape the constraints of waged employment in the food service industry and entrepreneurship as a restaurateur. Drawing on interviews with twelve cooks and a platform manager as well as web scraping of the 283 chef profiles on the platform, the study analyses three aspects of emancipation: economic autonomy, existential autonomy (consisting of rethinking the place of work in life) and autonomy in the exercise of the work itself. The article shows that emancipation is incomplete. Earnings remain low, professional constraints are more reconfigured than eliminated, and new forms of subjection to customers and the platform can emerge.