Uber likes to market itself as the future of work.
In a recent article, we argue that it also belongs to a much older American story: a line that runs from multi-level marketing organizations like Amway, through franchises like McDonald’s, to today’s platforms.
We call that longer history sponsored entrepreneurship. These are business models that invite people to act like independent entrepreneurs while supplying the brand, product, infrastructure, or operating system from above.
That promise can be powerful. It speaks directly to people who have often been pushed to the edges of standard employment, including women with care responsibilities, immigrants, racialized minorities, disabled workers, and others facing closed doors in the formal labor market. But the promise comes with a catch. The same organizations that advertise autonomy also find ways to control workers while shifting risk and cost onto individuals, families, communities, and the state.
Why look back
Many scholars have tried to explain the gig economy by analogy. Platforms have been compared to everything from sharecropping to feudalism. Instead of reaching for a metaphor, we trace two organizational forms that directly prepared the ground for platform labor in the United States: Multi-Level Marketing Firms (MLMs) and franchises.
This history matters because platforms did not invent the core move, which is to use legal mechanisms that exempt platforms from regulation. MLMs helped normalize the independent contractor classification, while franchises refined ways for a parent firm to dictate standards, monitor performance, and collect revenue without fully acting as an employer. Seen this way, Uber is not a clean break from the past. It is a newer version of an older arrangement that lets firms secure employee-like commitment without employee-like responsibility.
The pitch of sponsored entrepreneurship
Sponsored entrepreneurship works because its promises appeal on more than one level.
At the individual level, these organizations promise a shortcut to business ownership. MLMs offer products, training, and the ability to earn passive income from one’s downline, or recruits,; franchises offer a brand and operating manual; platforms offer an app, matching technology, and customers. At the community level, the promise grows. These models recruit through families, neighborhoods, churches, immigrant networks, and racialized communities, and they present themselves as ways to spread opportunity locally. At the state level, the promise is bigger still. MLMs, franchises, and platforms present themselves as tools for job creation, local development, and even public infrastructure.
That is one reason they often expand in moments of crisis. MLMs and franchises grew during the Depression and after the collapse of the Fordist social contract; platforms surged after the 2008 financial crisis and have continued to spread amid rising costs for housing, health care, education, and care work.
While there is economic appeal, these arrangements can also offer dignity, status, and the chance to fit paid work around family and community obligations, instead of pretending those obligations do not exist.
The catch of sponsored entrepreneurship
Yet the catch also appears at all three levels. At the individual level, autonomy is thinner than it may seem at first glance. MLM sellers face pressure from uplines and downlines, franchisees sign contracts that dictate fees, suppliers, and procedures, and platform workers answer to opaque algorithms, ratings, and debt-financed equipment. What looks like self-employment often feels closer to controlled dependence. Workers take on the risks of business ownership without the real power to set the terms.
Meanwhile, at the community level, the line between sociality and exploitation blurs. Friends are recruited as customers and family members often become unpaid helpers, while community ties are increasingly viewed as economic channels.
The jobs created by these models are often low-quality and offer little mobility. Even when firms market themselves as engines of empowerment, they can deepen wage inequality and move the work of care back onto households. A federal study found that low-wage workers across franchise chains, retail, and other service sectors relied on Medicaid and food assistance at higher rates than employees in similar sectors, and a more recent study found similar patterns workers on digital labor platforms.
At the state level, the promise of development can backfire too. Public officials may subsidize these firms, rewrite rules around them, or lean on them to patch weak infrastructure but public costs do not disappear. They reappear as public assistance for low-paid workers, weaker public services, new enforcement burdens, and greater dependence on private companies to do work the state no longer does well. One example we discuss is the Toronto suburb of Innisfil, which relied on Uber as a transit fix, subsidizing Uber’s services for residents. When prices rose, that solution looked much less like innovation and much more like a reduction in public service as the city’s budget ballooned.
What sponsored entrepreneurship means for the sociology of work
We use the phrase “exclusion by inclusion,” coined by Tressie McMillan Cottom, to describe this pattern. Sponsored entrepreneurship opens doors, but often on predatory terms. That helps explain why these models remain sticky. They are responding to real gaps in labor markets and public institutions, and to real desires for flexibility, recognition, and a more integrated life. But in the end, platforms lead to a degradation, or what Cory Doctorow calls enshitification, of services and labor conditions.
Sponsored entrepreneurship can even make traits that standard jobs devalue look like strengths. Gender, race, ethnicity, family ties, and community obligations are recast as assets rather than disqualifications since individuals are encouraged to recruit within these communities for new business opportunities. In MLMs, for example, distributors are encouraged to sell products and recruit new members within their own communities. Women, in particular, are attracted to the promise the flexibility to earn income alongside their family responsibilities. And within the Black community, franchise ownership is often touted as a way to offer employment in historically underserved neighborhoods and communities and build generational wealth.
That is why the task is not just to say that platforms are old news. The point is not that Uber is simply McDonald’s or Amway with an app. It also means our categories for thinking about work need updating. Once firms can control labor without formally employing it, the old employer-employee binary no longer captures where power lies and where costs fall.
Within sponsored entrepreneurship the costs of training, care, and everyday survival are displaced, usually onto workers and households, which is one reason these arrangements can feel flexible in the short run and punishing in the long run.
Older forms of sponsored entrepreneurship helped build the legal categories, cultural ideals, and organizational habits that made platform labor possible. If we want a better future of work, we need to look beyond the simple employee-contractor divide and ask who gets autonomy, who absorbs risk, and who benefits when entrepreneurship is sponsored from above.
Uber may look like the future, but the regulatory history that permitted earlier organizational forms is already baked into the platform.
About the Authors
Lindsey Cameron is an Assistant Professor of Management and a Dorinda and Mark Winkelman Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines how algorithmic management is changing the modern workplace, with a focus on the gig economy.
Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where she writes and teaches about the history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early nineteenth century to the present.
Read More
Moira Weigel and Lindsey D. Cameron. “From Amway to Uber: A genealogy of sponsored entrepreneurship” in Platforms & Society 2026.
Open-access PDF available here.