Start Date
12-16-2013
Description
Crowdsourcing offers new forms of work arrangements enabled and facilitated by the advancements in Internet technologies and growing popularity of social media. However, do these new forms of work empower workers to craft their own careers or do they create a sweatshop where workers complete fragmented tasks to earn minimal pay? We posit that career theories and job crafting approaches collectively provide valuable theoretical perspectives for examining this question. By assessing the degree to which these platforms afford or constrain the workers to exert their personal agencies (i.e., affords career and job crafting preferences), we argue, will partially determine whether these new forms of work are a harbinger of worker empowerment or exploitation. Preliminary findings of this exploratory research-in-progress, conducted using two types of workers on Amazon-Mechanical-Turk, reveal that these new forms of work arrangements have a potential for both empowerment and exploitation of workers.
Recommended Citation
Deng, Xuefei (Nancy) and Joshi, K.D., "Is Crowdsourcing a Source of Worker Empowerment or Exploitation? Understanding Crowd Workers’ Perceptions of Crowdsourcing Career" (2013). ICIS 2013 Proceedings. 33.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2013/proceedings/ResearchInProgress/33
Is Crowdsourcing a Source of Worker Empowerment or Exploitation? Understanding Crowd Workers’ Perceptions of Crowdsourcing Career
Crowdsourcing offers new forms of work arrangements enabled and facilitated by the advancements in Internet technologies and growing popularity of social media. However, do these new forms of work empower workers to craft their own careers or do they create a sweatshop where workers complete fragmented tasks to earn minimal pay? We posit that career theories and job crafting approaches collectively provide valuable theoretical perspectives for examining this question. By assessing the degree to which these platforms afford or constrain the workers to exert their personal agencies (i.e., affords career and job crafting preferences), we argue, will partially determine whether these new forms of work are a harbinger of worker empowerment or exploitation. Preliminary findings of this exploratory research-in-progress, conducted using two types of workers on Amazon-Mechanical-Turk, reveal that these new forms of work arrangements have a potential for both empowerment and exploitation of workers.