Flexibility in the gig economy: managing time on three online piecework platforms

• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12102
• Author: Vili Lehdonvirta
• Published date: 01 March 2018

© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Flexibility in the gig economy 13

New Technology, Work and Employment 33:1

ISSN 1468-005X

Flexibility in the gig economy: managing

time on three online piecework platforms

Vili Lehdonvirta

Gig economy platforms seem to provide extreme temporal flex-

ibility to workers, giving them full control over how to spend

each hour and minute of the day. What constraints do work-

ers face when attempting to exercise this flexibility? We use

30 worker interviews and other data to compare three online

piecework platforms with different histories and worker demo-

graphics: Mechanical Turk, MobileWorks, and CloudFactory.

We find that structural constraints (availability of work and

degree of worker dependence on the work) as well as cultural-

cognitive constraints (procrastination and presenteeism) lim-

it worker control over scheduling in practice. The severity of

these constraints varies significantly between platforms, the

formally freest platform presenting the greatest structural and

cultural- cognitive constraints. We also find that workers have

developed informal practices, tools, and communities to ad-

dress these constraints. We conclude that focusing on outcomes

rather than on worker control is a more fruitful way to assess

flexible working arrangements.

Keywords: flexible scheduling,, work-life balance, labour pro-

cess, non-standard work, gig work, microwork, social media,

sociomateriality.

Introduction

Industrialisation brought about the ‘tyranny of the clock’, as workers’ daily lives were

subjugated to the rhythms of production lines and bureaucratic offices. Information

and communication technologies (ICTs) are associated with new forms of work organ-

isation that rely less on regular rhythms and instead allocate tasks flexibly, on the basis

of demand and availability (Grimshaw et al., 2002; Holtgrewe, 2014). Most recently,

so- called gig economy platforms seem to give full control to workers over whether

they work or not each hour and minute of the day. In a series of surveys, 5–9 per cent

of adult Internet users in various European countries report working through such

platforms weekly (Huws et al., 2016). An index measuring the use of online gig plat-

forms suggests that they are growing globally at an annual rate of 26 per cent (Kässi

and Lehdonvirta, 2016). This rise of gig work is expected to allow people to combine

work with a variety of life situations and choices, boosting productivity while enabling

workers to achieve a better balance between work and other commitments (Malone,

2004; Gratton and Johns, 2013; Sundararajan, 2016).

Vili Lehdonvirta, (vili.lehdonvirta@oii.ox.ac.uk) is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow

at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is an economic sociologist with research in-

terests in digital marketplaces, labour markets, non-standard work, virtual consumption, and financial

technologies.

14 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Yet it was not the technologies as such that changed the temporal demands of work,

in the industrial era nor in the age of ICTs (Wajcman, 2015). Instead, technologies in-

teracting with existing institutions, structural conditions, and management ideologies

gave rise to new practices of how people conducted their working lives. For instance,

the adoption of teleworking technologies and flexible working time policies since

1980s has had diverse and often unexpected consequences. Gendered expectations

about who should spend time on domestic work have meant that women’s and men’s

time use has ended up being affected differently by the same technologies and policies

(Silver and Coldschejder, 1994). Differences in bargaining power have meant that one

worker’s flexibility has sometimes turned into another’s uncertainty (Lambert et al.,

2012). In the same way, the gig economy’s effects on the temporal structures of work

cannot be derived from technological possibilities alone, but are instead to be found in

the concrete practices that its users adopt.

In this article, we focus on the sociomaterial practices (that is, combinations of prac-

tices and material/technical arrangements) of online piecework, a subset of online gig

work where the work consists of standardised tasks paid on a piece- rate basis. Online

piecework represents roughly 10–20 per cent of all online gig work (Kuek et al., 2015;

Kässi and Lehdonvirta, 2016), and is characterised by a particularly short cycle time

and high degree of formal worker control over scheduling. We ask what kinds of struc-

tural and cultural- cognitive constraints online pieceworkers face in managing their

time, and what kinds of time management practices and technologies they adopt in the

absence of regular working hours and other workplace institutions. The objective is to

assess how much temporal flexibility online pieceworkers enjoy in practice, and by

doing so scrutinise broader claims about technology and flexibility.

Our overall research design is a comparative case study of three online piecework

platforms with different histories and demographics. We find that platforms vary in

how much competition they expose workers to, and thus how structurally constrained

workers’ scheduling decisions are. Attempts by workers to ‘hack’ the rules of the game

with custom software ultimately do little to mitigage structural pressures. We also find

cultural- cognitive constraints such as procrastination, which workers attribute to the

lack of external temporal structures. In response, workers have adopted a variety of

sophisticated personal time management practices and communities of practice. We

conclude among other things that maximising individual control over scheduling may

be somewhat a red herring, as successfully coordinating time in social practices with

others depends on shared temporal structures.

Background: online piecework and flexible scheduling

Online piecework can be defined as work performed remotely over the Internet for

piece- rate pay. It is frequently performed at home, but it can also be performed at

school, at an Internet café, or at the site of one’s regular employment (Gupta et al.,

2014). Typical online piecework tasks are standardised clerical and data entry tasks

that are easily metered. Online piecework can be distinguished from online freelancing

(paid on an hourly basis or on the basis of unique deliverables), as well as from local-

ised gig work, such as rides and deliveries. Online marketplaces such as Amazon

Mechanical Turk act as matchmakers between employers and workers of online piece-

work (Bergvall- Kåreborn and Howcroft, 2014). Internet- based business process out-

sourcing (BPO) companies such as MobileWorks and CloudFactory offer online

piecework to workers through their websites. We refer to all these sources of online

piecework as ‘platforms’.

Online piecework is conceptually related to crowdsourcing, originally defined as the

practice of soliciting work from a “crowd” via an open call on the Internet (Howe,

2009). Crowdsourced work can be paid on a piece- rate basis, in which case it is online

piecework (Barnes et al., 2015). But crowdsourced work can also be paid on other bases,

or not paid at all (Kleemann et al., 2008). Online pieceworkers can also be recruited via