Slices and Lumps Symposium

For close to ten years, the gig economy has dazzled with its seeming powers of disaggregation.

Professor Lee Fennell’s groundbreaking Slices and Lumps incisively reconceptualizes how the gig—or “slicing”—economy impacts the structuring of work. But it goes even further to alert us to how “delumping the working experience” (p 6) can transform the infrastructure of work, from an individual’s task design to the agglomeration costs and benefits of untying and retying workers to desks, work to benefits, and worksites to surrounding communities.

Slices and Lumps, the remarkable new book by Professor Lee Fennell, begins from the title itself to tell a story about the instability of how the world is organized. Lumps can be natural things, formed in a bowl by humidity’s kiss, but slices are often the work of human intervention.

Slices and Lumps is a recipe book for thinking. Using a deceptively simple analytical framework, the book showcases the power of conceptualizing the world through the prism of “slices” and “lumps.”

Economists often employ a convenient set of assumptions regarding the goods that individuals care about and the form of individuals’ preferences for these goods.