Principal Forms of Crowdsourcing and Crowd Work

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.