Browsing by Author "Durward, David"

Crowdsourcing has drawn much attention from researchers in the past. Thus, there are already attempts to conceptualize and classify the phenomenon. All of the existing work has their merits; however they lack an overviewing perspective or meta-characteristic. They are conceptual in nature, lack theoretical grounding, and – most importantly – are not empirically validated. Hence, we develop an empirical taxonomy of crowdsourcing intermediaries embedded in the theory of two-sided markets. Collecting data from 100 intermediaries and performing cluster analysis, we identify five archetypes of crowdsourcing intermediaries: Micro-tasking, knowledge work, design competition, testing and validation as well as innovation. The taxonomy establishes a systematic and comprehensive overview of crowdsourcing intermediaries and thereby provides a better understanding of the basic types of crowdsourcing and its core functions. For practice, we provide decision support for crowdsourcers as well as crowdsourcees on which platform to be active on.

As software development cycles become shorter and shorter, while software complexity in-creases and IT budgets stagnate, many companies are looking for new ways of acquiring and sourcing knowledge outside their boundaries. One promising solution to aggregate know-how and manage large distributed teams in software development is crowdsourcing. This paper analyzes the existing body of knowledge regarding crowdsourcing in software development. As a result, we propose a fundamental framework with five dimensions to structure the existing insights of crowdsourcing in the context of software development and to derive a research agenda to guide further research.

Digitalization gives rise to dynamic forces shaping future working structures. In practice, companies are increasingly interested in using their own employees as an internal crowd. Drawing on socio-technical systems (STS) perspective, organizations must understand how they can embed an internal crowdsourcing system effectively in order to exploit its potential. In particular, organizations need assistance in designing internal crowdsourcing systems. Thus, we follow an action design research approach and develop comprehensive design guidelines for designing an internal crowdsourcing system. The paper in hand develops the design guidelines by deriving the requirements from literature, developing them further in a bank project and evaluating them with external experts. Furthermore, we assess what tools can cover which part of the system and implement the system. The short paper will present the derived requirements, the first design of the internal crowdsourcing system and explain next steps of the full paper as well as the contribution.

In this paper, we analyze internal crowd work as Neo-STS from an employee’s perspective. Based on qualitative interviews, we describe in our model how employees perceive empowerment through participation in internal crowd work. As our main contribution, we detail and extend existing research regarding internal crowd work, Neo-STS as well as empowerment by identifying structural antecedents that affect psychological empowerment of internal crowd workers.

Crowd work has emerged as a new form of digital gainful employment that changes the nature of work. However, an increasing number of people perform certain tasks in the crowd and start to identify with this work. In this paper, we outline our research in progress which is concerned with the effects of work characteristics in crowd work that have impact on the individual’s identification. Thus, we developed our research model and conducted an online survey amongst 434 crowd workers to ex-amine their perception of work and illustrate the antecedences of identification. Our expected contribution will increase the understanding of crowd work and extend prior research on self-determination theory (SDT) and work design. For practice, we provide important insights for platform providers to (re-) design work on platform in order to increase identification among their crowd. In addition, our findings can serve as common basis for future discussions on decent crowd work.

Internal crowd work has emerged as a new form of digital gainful employment that changes the nature of work. However, the possible effects of internal crowd work on the individual level have been largely neglected. In this paper, we therefore present our research in progress which is concerned with the effects of work characteristics in internal crowd work that have impact on the individual’s empowerment and satisfaction. Thus, we developed our research model and conducted an online survey amongst 118 internal crowd workers of a Swiss bank who were asked to test new software. Our expected contribution will increase the understanding of internal crowd work and provide important insights for organizations to (re-) design work on internal IT-platforms.

The phenomenon of crowdsourcing has emerged as a new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. This novel socio-technical arrangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature and takes place in information systems (IS) in which humans face many threats to their dignity. For this reason, the importance of ethical issues within this new form of employment arises. Hence, in this paper we focus on the ethical issues in crowd work – a perspective that has been largely neglected by current crowdsourcing research. We analyze recent crowdsourcing literature and extract ethical issues by following the PAPA (privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility of information) concept, a well-established approach in IS. The review focuses on the individual perspective of crowdworkers, which addresses their working conditions and benefits. Although, the literature review exhibits that there are PAPA dimensions in crowdsourcing, only few focus on the crowdworkers as individuals. Our findings contribute to further research in crowdsourcing by introducing an ethical framework and give practical insight into how to design sustainable and ethical crowd work.

Crowdsourcing has emerged as new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. It refers to the outsourcing of certain tasks to an undefined mass of people through an open call. In a crowdsourcing model is always the role of the client; we call crowdsourcer, and the role of undefined contractors, the crowdsourcees or crowdworker. This novel socio-technical arrangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature and is gaining popularity in recent years. Companies can apply crowdsourcing along their entire value chain and give almost any task to the crowd. These tasks can be roughly divided into three categories (crowdvoting, crowdfunding, crowdcreation) depending on the effort of the crowdworkers. Crowdsourcing differs from existing coordination mechanisms and occurs in an internal and an external form. Whereas external crowdsourcing describes the outsourcing of tasks beyond the company's boundaries through an intermediary, the internal form can be observed by the example of IBM, which uses their own globally distributed workforce as a crowd. While the internal crowdworker as employees retain their participation as well as protection rights and benefit from collective regulations, external crowdsourcing lacks in similar arrangements. Nevertheless, we recognize several motivations of crowdworkers to participate in crowdsourcing initiatives. Besides the monetary compensation, there are other extrinsic and intrinsic motives like social exchange or fun working in the crowd. In general, companies using crowdsourcing benefit from the access to a large pool of knowledge and expertise but also facing risks of losing control or the outflow of internal know-how. Similarly, the individual crowdworkers have advantages in a higher self-determination as well as flexibility and new employment opportunities. However, there are also risks for the crowdworkers, which are based in monotonous work processes, lower rewards or the lack of a legal framework. Hence, there are major challenges in the implementation of crowdsourcing and that is why further research is essential. On the one hand the impact of crowdsourcing on the workforce and changes in work organization should be on the research agenda. On the other hand further research must seek to ensure fair working conditions, because crowdsourcing sustainably changes the nature of work and the availability of labor. It leads to technical, organizational, juristic and social challenges but also opens up chances in new business models and services.

New Forms of Employment in Europe sheds light on policy options for policymakers and practitioners on the position regarding new forms of employment in EU Member States and other European countries. In recent years, new forms of employment have been on the rise all over Europe. The ‘full-time job’ is now no longer an option for many people seeking employment. It has been replaced by an ever-expanding plethora of ‘atypical’ employment relationships designed by employers to streamline their operations and/or take advantage of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Numerous labour law issues arise, demanding urgent attention. How should law and policy best address these challenges? This timely book explores this contentious topic in depth, presenting ten penetrating chapters on aspects of the topic by leading European labour law authorities followed by reports on new forms of employment in thirty-five European countries.

In recent years, companies have been getting access to larger pools of workers, and the phenomenon of crowdsourcing has emerged as a new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. In parallel, an ongoing digitalisation has been accelerating the division of labour through hyperspecialisation and giving rise to new forms of work, for example crowd work. This paper illustrates the differences between crowdsourcing as an alternative concept of organizing, and crowd work as a new form of digital gainful work. The variety of crowdsourcing applications on the one hand, and the different forms of crowd work on the other, will be introduced. In summary, more and more individuals decide to work online in the crowd, and those crowds consist of people of any social strata, age or location. Hence, with the rise of crowd work, several opportunities and risks for all of these participants can be observed and need to be addressed.

Crowdsourcing has emerged as new form of digital work organization. This novel socio-technical ar-rangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature. In this paper, we focus on the crowdworkers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by crowdsourcing research. We re-port results from crowdworker-interviews on two different platforms. Our research shows that quality signals of crowdworkers increase the bargaining power towards their principals, i.e. the crowdsourcers. As a result, the crowdworkers can reach a turning point of critical bargaining power at which the distribution of power shifts in their favor. We contribute to the literature by unraveling signaling behavior as mechanism influencing bargaining power and thus success in crowdsourcing. Beyond, we develop a theoretical model that indicates a shift in bargaining power over time and im-proves our understanding of crowdsourcing as novel way of organizing digital work. For practice, our results provide guidelines for crowdworkers how to improve their position in bargaining in relation to the crowdsourcer.