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The Nature of Crowd Work and its Effects on Individuals’ Work Perception

2020-03-03 , Durward, David , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco

Crowd work reflects a new form of gainful employment on the Internet. We study how the nature of the tasks being performed and financial compensation jointly shape work perceptions of crowdworkers in order to better understand the changing modes and patterns of digital work. Surveying individuals on 23 German crowd working platforms, this work is the first to add a multi-platform perspective on perceived working conditions in crowd work. We show that crowd workers need rather high levels of financial compensation before task characteristics become relevant for shaping favorable perceptions of working conditions. We explain these results by considering financial compensation as an informational cue indicating the appreciation of working effort that is internalized by well-paid crowd workers. Resulting boundary conditions for task design are discussed. These results help us understand when and under what conditions crowd work can be regarded as a fulfilling type of employment in highly developed countries.

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Exploiting the Digitization of Leisure Time: Casual Work and Additional Earnings for Individuals on Crowdworking Platforms

2017 , Mrass, Volkmar , Peters, Christoph , Leimeister, Jan Marco

Besides seminal effects and implications on individual’s lives and their social interactions, the increasing digitization also offers individuals new opportunities for casual work and additional earnings. One ‘instrument’ to exploit such opportunities are crowdworking platforms – electronic platforms that act as intermediaries between organizations who offer work and individuals who process it. These platforms include a paradigmatic change – work is not assigned to individuals anymore, they instead choose themselves what kind of work and when they proceed it. Such work is often done to ‘make some money on the side’, using mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets and exploiting idle time such as waiting time respectively leisure time. This paper examines current working opportunities for individuals via such crowdworking platforms. We show which kind of platforms are especially suitable for such individual casual work and derive possible future implications.

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Crowd Worker in Deutschland : Eine empirische Studie zum Arbeitsumfeld auf externen Crowdsourcing-Plattformen

2016 , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Durward, David , Zogaj, Shkodran

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Arbeit und IT: Crowdsourcing und Crowdwork als neue Arbeits- und Beschäftigungsformen

2015 , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Zogaj, Shkodran , Durward, David , Blohm, Ivo

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Von Kunden für Kunden: Crowd Services als Erweiterung der Digital Customer Experience

2017 , Mrass, Volkmar , Peters, Christoph , Leimeister, Jan Marco

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Is There PAPA in Crowd Work? : A Literature Review on Ethical Dimensions in Crowdsourcing

2016-07-18 , Durward, David , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco

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.

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Crowdworking-Plattformen als Enabler neuer Formen der Arbeitsorganisation

2018 , Mrass, Volkmar , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Fortmann, Harald R. , Kolocek, Barbara

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The Rise of Crowd Aggregators - How Individual Workers Restructure Their Own Crowd

2017-02-12 , Durward, David , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Brenner, Walter

Crowd work has emerged as a new form of digital gainful employment whose nature is still a black box. In this paper, we focus on the crowd workers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by research. We report results from crowd worker interviews on two different platforms. Our findings illustrate that crowd aggregators as new players restructure the nature of crowd work sustainably with different effects on the behavior as well as the existing relationships of crowd workers. We contribute to prior research by developing a theoretical framework based on value chain and work aggregation theories which are applicable in this new form of digital labor. For practice, our results provide initial insights that need to be taken into account as part of the ongoing discussion on fair and decent conditions in crowd work.

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New Forms of Employment And IT - Crowdsourcing

2015 , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Zogaj, Shkodran , Durward, David

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.

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Principal Forms of Crowdsourcing and Crowd Work

2016 , Durward, David , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Wobbe, Werner , Bova, Elva , Dragomirescu-Gaina, Catalin

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.