Triangular love–hate: management and control in creative crowdworking

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which creative crowdwork is managed and controlled within social and economic power relations. It presents findings from a research project on creative crowdworkers focussing on aspects of management and control. The research shows that the design of the platforms and the strategies of their operating companies clearly structure the triangular relationship between platform, clients and workers. In addition to bureaucratic rules and surveillance exercised by the platform, rating opportunities and other control features utilised by clients strongly impact on crowdworkers’ time use, income and creativity and thus on their working and living conditions.

‘Becoming mainstream’: the professionalisation and corporatisation of digital nomadism

“…The result is a constant search for both internal and external transformations of capitalism through ‘geographical expansion and geographical restructuring’ (Harvey, : 24). As previously argued, this highlights the extent to which the forces of capitalism and the codes of corporate and even bureaucratic cultures have infiltrated the digital nomad movement (see Schörpf et al () for a similar comment on crowdwork), with both the opportunities and threats connected to capitalism framing the development of digital nomadism.…”

Of crowds and talents: discursive constructions of global online labour

“…The English term ‘crowdworking’ is predominant; for example, it even pervades German‐language scientific and political discourses (cf. Benner, ; Durward et al ., ; Schörpf et al ., ). In international research, the concurrent usage of various terms (e.g.…”

“…Recent German surveys suggest that the vast majority of online workers might not gain such a sense of identity because the jobs procured through online platforms in most cases only serve to generate small amounts of extra income (Pongratz and Bormann, ). Qualitative studies have considerably increased our knowledge about the working and living conditions of online workers (Barnes et al ., ; Lehdonvirta et al ., ; Schörpf et al ., ). But we still know little about how they conceive their work roles, what they think about their coworkers and whether they are in contact with each other.…”

“…But we still know little about how they conceive their work roles, what they think about their coworkers and whether they are in contact with each other. Reasons for collective action might be frequent experiences of dependency on grounds of refusal of payment, price dumping, loss of copyrights or imbalance of information (Schörpf et al, ).…”

“…These mechanisms, taken together, testify to a fundamental asymmetry of power in the relationships of platforms and workers (cf. Schörpf et al ., ).…”