Crowd and Community: Organizations and Occupations in Crowdsourced Work

Abstract

Over the past two decades, firms have relied increasingly upon external workers rather than employees for their core production tasks. More recently, firms in the high-technology and software industries have come to rely on crowdsourced workers, who are formally external to firms and organized via the Internet. This project investigates the management of crowdsourced work by firms, the experiences of crowdsourced workers themselves, and the implications for organizational boundaries and occupational identity within and outside of firms. Three motivating questions are central to the research presented here. First, how does crowdsourced work remain socially embedded despite pressures toward atomization? Second, in the absence of employment relationships, how do organizations approach the socialization of crowdsourced workers as variously organizational and occupational members. Third, how is control established among non-employees when work is completed online? To answer these questions, this project relies on organizational ethnography, practiced online and offline for two years, and interviews with crowdsourced workers and employees of three software firms. These firms were similar in their reliance on crowdsourced work, yet distinct in size, product, skill requirements, and models of incorporating external workers.