Community building on crowdwork platforms: Autonomy and control of online workers?

Abstract

Crowdwork is commonly described as an extremely isolating and anonymous form of work. Contrary to this, the article examines platforms’ managerial strategies to engineer so-called crowd communities. The results show that platforms assume either more controlled or lose strategies, which results in lower or higher crowdworker interaction, respectively. None of the communication spaces, however, seem to enhance labour power. While to some extent breaking the sociotechnical isolation of the crowd, the article suggests that crowd interaction serves to scale and outsource managerial tasks to the online workers in a highly rationalized work regime. Where it arises the self-organization is largely a self-regulation and reflects crowdworkers’ efforts to cope with the work system. Overall, the findings suggest that platforms develop more diverse and complex managerial systems than often assumed.

Antagonism beyond employment: how the ‘subordinated agency’ of labour platforms generates conflict in the remote gig economy

“…This means that small acts of participation via the Internet, which entail fewer costs and resources (Margetts et al, 2015), may remain the most common form of collective action in the remote gig economy (see: Irani and Silberman, 2013;Salehi et al, 2015;Lehdonvirta, 2016;Wood et al, 2018;Johnston and Land-Kazlauskas, 2019;Panteli et al, 2020). Importantly, then, our findings also highlight that it is possible for remote gig workers within a context of heightened antagonism to transform platform voice infrastructures, such as forums that are designed to be platform-controlled 'microphones' (Gerber and Krzywdzinkski, 2019;Gegenhuber et al, 2020;Gerber, 2020) into spaces for collective voice.…”

“…To answer this question, we followed Gawer (2014Gawer ( , p. 1240 in taking an agent-centric focus that is able to explore and 'make explicit the micro-foundations of how platforms operate'. This approach complements extant research that has collected data on remote gig economy platforms' management, design, clients and transactions (Corporaal and Lehdonvirta, 2017;Lehdonvirta, 2018;Gerber and Krzywdzinkski, 2019;Lehdonvirta et al, 2019;Wood et al, 2019b;Gegenhuber et al, 2020;Gerber, 2020). Our overall empirical approach is similar to the broadly ethnographic approach of Fantasia (1988) in his classic investigation of worker solidarity.…”

Understanding industry emergence through entrepreneurship from a social movement perspective

“…Afterward, they will break off from the collective activity in order to battle for reputation gains (Barnett, 2006). With time, as industries start to develop, the role of movements declines because these industries overcome their liabilities, providing budding entrepreneurs with rich opportunities and thereby encouraging entrepreneurship based on entrepreneurial agency (Carlos et al, 2014) even if some form of community might persist (Gerber, 2020).…”

Collective resistance and organizational creativity amongst Europes platform workers: a new power in the labour movement?

“…The platforms themselves also provide a means for platform workers to share information and experiences amongst themselves via discussion forums and other types of online interaction. In practice, they control this digital architecture for community-building: community management is simply delegated to experienced platform workers who tend to orient themselves towards 'improving and optimising organizational performance' (Gegenhuber et al 2021(Gegenhuber et al , p. 1495Gerber 2021). This feeds into the view that online platform workers predominantly have an 'entrepreneurial orientation' (Vallas and Schor 2020, p. 5).…”