Start Date
11-12-2016 12:00 AM
Description
While the use of social IT-enabled “internal crowdsourcing” with employees in organizations has substantially increased in recent years (e.g., LEGO, IBM), internal crowdsourcing is not well understood from a theoretical point of view. In this research in progress, we build on the literature on new forms of organizing to improve our theoretical understanding of internal crowdsourcing, to consider whether it constitutes a theoretically distinct phenomenon, and to gain insights into its theoretical nature. The paper presents insights from an ongoing interpretivist field study of internal crowdsourcing at the multinational company BOSCH. Theorized as a form of organizing, we find that internal crowdsourcing is a very different form of organizing compared to work based on fixed assignments. Among the key dimensions of organizing, we identify internal crowdsourcing’s “open calls” model of work allocation as the key characteristic.
Recommended Citation
Zuchowski, Oliver; Schlagwein, Daniel; and Fischbach, Kai, "“Open Calls” Rather than “Fixed Assignments”: A Longitudinal Field Study of the Nature and Consequences of Internal Crowdsourcing" (2016). ICIS 2016 Proceedings. 11.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2016/Crowdsourcing/Presentations/11
“Open Calls” Rather than “Fixed Assignments”: A Longitudinal Field Study of the Nature and Consequences of Internal Crowdsourcing
While the use of social IT-enabled “internal crowdsourcing” with employees in organizations has substantially increased in recent years (e.g., LEGO, IBM), internal crowdsourcing is not well understood from a theoretical point of view. In this research in progress, we build on the literature on new forms of organizing to improve our theoretical understanding of internal crowdsourcing, to consider whether it constitutes a theoretically distinct phenomenon, and to gain insights into its theoretical nature. The paper presents insights from an ongoing interpretivist field study of internal crowdsourcing at the multinational company BOSCH. Theorized as a form of organizing, we find that internal crowdsourcing is a very different form of organizing compared to work based on fixed assignments. Among the key dimensions of organizing, we identify internal crowdsourcing’s “open calls” model of work allocation as the key characteristic.