Amazon Mechanical Turk and the commodification of labour

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12038
• Date: 01 November 2014
• Author: Birgitta Bergvall‐Kåreborn,Debra Howcroft
• Published date: 01 November 2014

Amazon Mechanical Turk and the

commodification of labour

Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn and Debra Howcroft

Crowd employment platforms enable firms to source labour and

expertise by leveraging Internet technology. Rather than

offshoring jobs to low-cost geographies, functions once per-

formed by internal employees can be outsourced to an undefined

pool of digital labour using a virtual network. This enables firms

to shift costs and offload risk as they access a flexible, scalable

workforce that sits outside the traditional boundaries of labour

laws and regulations. The micro-tasks of ‘clickwork’ are

tedious, repetitive and poorly paid, with remuneration often

well below minimum wage. This article will present an analysis

of one of the most popular crowdsourcing sites—Mechanical

Turk—to illuminate how Amazon’s platform enables an array

of companies to access digital labour at low cost and without

any of the associated social protection or moral obligation.

Keywords: Amazon, Mechanical Turk, crowdsourcing, digital

labour, outsourcing, platform, crowd employment, ICT firms.

Introduction

Images of computerisation and its economic and social impacts on the ‘future of work’

are often replete with deterministic predictions that people will be supplanted by

robots. Whether the speculation is utopian or dystopian in intent, the displacement of

repetitive, routinised, tedious tasks with automated processes is presumed, given the

speed of innovation in the ICT sector (Holtgrewe, 2014). This epitomises the ‘Informa-

tion Revolution’ that led to a raft of populist predictions about the liberating and

democratising potential of technology (Baldry, 2012). Yet history tells us that under-

standing reconfigurations of work and the relations of production requires going

beyond simplistic assumptions that technological innovation will lead to transforma-

tion (Howcroft and Taylor, 2014).

In contrast to the more evangelical literature on IT-enabled change, studies are

needed that dispense with ‘black boxing’ technology and are instead situated in the

context of capitalist political economy. One of the clear outcomes emerging from the

evolution of the computing industry is the rise of a small number of elite power

brokers in the form of high-tech firms. The previously dominant manufacturers and

suppliers of computer devices and peripherals (such as IBM, Cisco and Intel)

Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn is Professorin Social Informatics at Luleå University of Technology. Her

current research interests concern participatory design in distributed and open environments; human

centric and appreciative methodologies for design and learning; as well as the relation between IT-use

and IT-design. Debra Howcroft is Professor of Technology and Organisation at Manchester Business

School and a member of FairWRC. She is co-editor of New Technology, Work and Employment and

serves on a number of editorial boards. Broadly, her research interests are concerned with work and

employment issues surrounding information and communication technologies.

New Technology, Work and Employment 29:3

ISSN 0268-1072

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Amazon Mechanical Turk 213