Impact sourcing in India: managing people, clients, and growth at ServImpact

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Unleashing the Potential of Crowd Work: The Need for a Post-Taylorism Crowdsourcing Model

Paid crowdsourcing connects task requesters to a globalized, skilled workforce that is available 24/7. In doing so, this new labor model promises not only to complete work faster and more efficiently than any previous approach but also to harness the best of our collective capacities. Nevertheless, for almost a decade now, crowdsourcing has been limited to addressing rather straightforward and simple tasks. Large-scale innovation, creativity, and wicked problem solving are still largely out of the crowd’s reach. In this opinion paper, we argue that existing crowdsourcing practices bear significant resemblance to the management paradigm of Taylorism. Although criticized and often abandoned by modern organizations, Taylorism principles are prevalent in many crowdsourcing platforms, which employ practices such as the forceful decomposition of all tasks regardless of their knowledge nature and the disallowing of worker interactions, which diminish worker motivation and performance. We argue that a shift toward post-Taylorism is necessary to enable the crowd address at scale the complex problems that form the backbone of today’s knowledge economy. Drawing from recent literature, we highlight four design rules that can help make this shift, namely, endorsing social crowd networks, encouraging teamwork, scaffolding ownership of one’s work within the crowd, and leveraging algorithm-guided worker self-coordination.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171075/1/Lykourentzou et al. 2021.pdfDescription of Lykourentzou et al. 2021.pdf : Final ArticleSEL

The Dawn of Crowdfarms

Some small companies are making crowdwork part of their formal business via teams that can complete multifaceted, complex tasks requiring specialized expertise

Modus Operandi of Crowd Workers : The Invisible Role of Microtask Work Environments

The ubiquity of the Internet and the widespread proliferation of electronic devices has resulted in flourishing microtask crowdsourcing marketplaces, such as Amazon MTurk. An aspect that has remained largely invisible in microtask crowdsourcing is that of work environments; defined as the hardware and software affordances at the disposal of crowd workers which are used to complete microtasks on crowdsourcing platforms. In this paper, we reveal the significant role of work environments in the shaping of crowd work. First, through a pilot study surveying the good and bad experiences workers had with UI elements in crowd work, we revealed the typical issues workers face. Based on these findings, we then deployed over 100 distinct microtasks on CrowdFlower, addressing workers in India and USA in two identical batches. These tasks emulate the good and bad UI element designs that characterize crowdsourcing microtasks. We recorded hardware specifics such as CPU speed and device type, apart from software specifics including the browsers used to complete tasks, operating systems on the device, and other properties that define the work environments of crowd workers. Our findings indicate that crowd workers are embedded in a variety of work environments which influence the quality of work produced. To confirm and validate our data-driven findings we then carried out semi-structured interviews with a sample of Indian and American crowd workers from this platform. Depending on the design of UI elements in microtasks, we found that some work environments are more suitable than others to support crowd workers. Based on our overall findings resulting from all the three studies, we introduce ModOp, a tool that helps to design crowdsourcing microtasks that are suitable for diverse crowd work environments. We empirically show that the use of ModOp results in reducing the cognitive load of workers, thereby improving their user experience without effecting the accuracy or task completion time

An Examination of the Work Practices of Crowdfarms

Crowdsourcing is a new value creation business model. Annual revenue of the Chinese market alone is hundreds of millions of dollars, yet few studies have focused on the practices of the Chinese crowdsourcing workforce, and those that do mainly focus on solo crowdworkers. We have extended our study of solo crowdworker practices to include crowdfarms, a relatively new entry to the gig economy: small companies that carry out crowdwork as a key part of their business. We report here on interviews of people who work in 53 crowdfarms. We describe how crowdfarms procure jobs, carry out macrotasks and microtasks, manage their reputation, and employ different management practices to motivate crowdworkers and customers

Crowdwork, digital liminality and the enactment of culturally recognised alternatives to Western precarity: beyond epistemological terra nullius

Research on crowdwork in developing countries considers it precarious. This reproduces its Western conceptualisation assuming that crowdworkers in developing countries imitate their Western counterparts, without close examination of their experiences and responses to work conditions. This study breaks this epistemological terra nullius to pursue an in-depth examination of workers’ lived experience in a developing country and provide a non-Western perspective. It questions how crowdworkers experience and respond to crowdwork and adopts an inductive approach in examining crowdworkers in Nigeria. Unlike the work precarity thesis, we find that crowdworkers in Nigeria transition and transform crowdwork into long-term employment, drawing on their own cultural heritage, social norms and traditions. Through the lens of the indigenous theory of liminality, we conceptualise crowdwork as liminal digital work and uncover three phases in this transformation process. The study concludes that the agency of workers, their culture and their own context play important roles in their experience of crowdwork. This demonstrates that the in-depth examination of the phenomenon in developing countries could destabilise the dominant knowledge, decoupling it from its origin of production and exposing and examining its implicit and explicit assumptions, and hence advance theorisation

Primary vendor capabilities in a mediated outsourcing model:can IT service providers leverage crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing platforms that attract a large pool of potential workforce allow organizations to reduce permanent staff levels. However managing this "human cloud" requires new management models and skills. Therefore, Information Technology (IT) service providers engaging in crowdsourcing need to develop new capabilities to successfully utilize crowdsourcing in delivering services to their clients. To explore these capabilities we collected qualitative data from focus groups with crowdsourcing leaders at a large multinational technology organization. New capabilities we identified stem from the need of the traditional service provider to assume a "client" role in the crowdsourcing context, while still acting as a "vendor" in providing services to the end-client. This paper expands the research on vendor capabilities and IT outsourcing as well as offers important insights to organizations that are experimenting with, or considering, crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing in China: Exploring the Work Experience of Solo Crowdworkers and Crowdfarm Workers

Recent research highlights the potential of crowdsourcing in China. Yet very few studies explore the workplace context and experiences of Chinese crowdworkers. Those that do, focus mainly on the work experiences of solo crowdworkers but do not deal with issues pertaining to the substantial amount of people working in ‘crowdfarms’. This article addresses this gap as one of its primary concerns. Drawing on a study that involves 48 participants, our research explores, compares and contrasts the work experiences of solo crowdworkers to those of crowdfarm workers. Our findings illustrate that the work experiences and context of the solo workers and crowdfarm workers are substantially different, with regards to their motivations, the ways they engage with crowdsourcing, the tasks they work on, and the crowdsourcing platforms they utilize. Overall, our study contributes to furthering the understandings on the work experiences of crowdworkers in China