Of crowds and talents: discursive constructions of global online labour

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12104
AuthorHans J. Pongratz
Date01 March 2018
Published date01 March 2018
58 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and
John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
New Technology, Work and Employment 33:1
ISSN 1468-005X
Of crowds and talents: discursive
constructions of global online labour
Hans J. Pongratz
Online platforms not only serve to exchange information and
goods but increasingly also service work provided by the self-
employed. The emergence of crowdsourcing of paid work has
created a global market for online labour where services can
be fully acquired and provided irrespective of location via
platforms such as upwork.com or freelancer.com. Drawing
on a content analysis of the websites of 44 globally operating
platforms, this study has investigated the discursive construc-
tion of this new type of labour market. The findings show that
platforms address the online workforce in different ways, for
instance, as workers or freelancers. Contrary to their blanket
characterisation as an anonymous crowd in previous academ-
ic debate, in most cases, online workers are forced to present
themselves as talented experts to distinguish themselves from
the mass of competitors. The control over online labour that
these platforms exercise challenges existing conceptions of pro-
fessionalism and self- employment.
Keywords: online labour, crowdsourcing, freelancer, online
workers, digitalisation, platform economy, labour market
Digitalisation and the emergence of a worldwide information space based on the
Internet have manifold implications for labour markets (Boes et al., 2017). Internet plat-
forms, well known from social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn, are increasingly
being used for the recruitment of human resources. For many years now, job boards
for permanent employment, temporary projects and jobs for the self- employed have
been appearing on the Internet. The most spectacular development in recent years is
associated with models of sharing economy: platforms such as Uber or Airbnb organ-
ise the exchange of transportation or accommodation services between private persons
(P2P business). Apart from job boards and sharing platforms, this paper focuses on
another major effect of digitalisation on the global labour market: the outsourcing of
digitally processible tasks as paid work to a global workforce via Internet platforms
such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), Upwork or Freelancer. This development
has been debated under the headings of crowdsourcing and crowd work (Barnes et al.,
2013; Hossain and Kauranen, 2015; Leimeister et al., 2015).
The renaissance of crowd terminology (Wexler, 2011) is based on recent popularisa-
tions of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ (Surowiecki, 2005) and ‘collective intelligence’ (Lévy,
1997). They maintain that, in one way or another, the coordinated activities of large
groups (e.g. in open- source projects), by means of collaboration as well as competition,
gain emergent qualities that extend beyond the capabilities of the individual group
members. This paper challenges crowd terminology in the context of paid work and
Hans J. Pongratz (hans.pongratz@lmu.de) is associate professor at the Department of Sociology, Ludwig-
Maximilians- Universitat Munchen, Munich, Germany. His research interests lie in the fields of sociology of
work, employment studies and qualitative methodology.
© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and
John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Of crowds and talents in online labour 59
discusses alternative analytical concepts. Though large numbers of workers are
involved in the global online labour market, there is some evidence that they are
addressed as individual experts rather than as an anonymous mass of people. The
paper compares the notions and concepts that dominate the public debate with the
terms and ideas prevailing on the platforms’ websites. These discursive constructions
are analysed to identify core features as well as conceptual differentiations of the
crowdsourcing of paid work as a labour market phenomenon. The paper suggests that
the semantics used in public discourses are of crucial importance for the development
of relationships between the key players in the virtual sphere of Internet platforms.
The empirical basis is a content analysis of 44 platforms for online labour, all of
which operate globally and communicate in English with their users. The analysis fo-
cusses on the variety of terminology in use: Why are the workers rarely addressed as a
crowd on these platforms in contrast with the widespread use of this term in the public
and scientific discourses? The paper links two different strands of research that have
evolved separately: the most prevalent strand (mainly from business economics and
computer sciences) concentrates on platform designs and their enhancement, whereas
the more marginal strand of labour market studies (mainly from social sciences and
political economy) critically debates the consequences for workers. The present study
adds a sociological perspective that includes complementary interpretations of current
organisational and occupational strategies in capitalist economies. In the next sections,
the object of investigation is introduced and the analytical framework is outlined. The
subsequent section then presents the methodology and empirical results, followed by
an interpretation of the key findings. The paper ends with a discussion of some lessons
to be learned from the discursive constructions of online labour for future research on
work in the digital era.
Global online labour
There is no consensus in the scientific debate so far about how global online outsourc-
ing via Internet platforms should be termed and how its core features are thus to be
characterised. While crowdsourcing and crowd work have emerged as the dominant
terms in this discourse, several alternative categories are used as well, particularly
online labour (Beerepoot and Lambregts, 2014), on- demand work (De Stefano, 2016),
online outsourcing (Kuek et al., 2015) or gig economy (Graham et al., 2017). In this pa-
per, crowdsourcing of paid work will be called online labour and the workers will be
referred to as online workforce. The reason is that, by employing Internet tools, these
platforms challenge established employment patterns and strongly affect the condi-
tions of competition in labour markets. Issues of professionalism, such as quality and
qualifications, are at stake as well as employment issues such as wage levels and work-
ing conditions. A clear distinction must be drawn between online labour and mobile
labour (e.g. food delivery or transport services provided by platforms like Deliveroo or
Uber) where services are delivered physically and require direct interaction between
customers and workers (cf. Codagnone et al., 2016).
Nowadays, quite a substantial amount of work is of course done online by employ-
ing the Internet for information and communication purposes. In contrast with this
widespread use of the Internet as a tool, the specific characteristic of online labour is
that the whole work process is processed online according to the rules of an Internet
platform: from initial instruction to the final transfer of results and their evaluation.
This peculiarity limits the application of online labour to digitally accomplishable
tasks with results that can be delivered completely and in full quality via the Internet
(e.g. texts and graphics). Within this scope, online labour bears unforeseen potential
(Beerepoot and Lambregts, 2014). If tasks can be commissioned and results delivered
entirely online, this digital labour market stretches across the entire globe to any point
where Internet service is available. The only prerequisites are that everyone involved
has access to the platform through software and hardware devices and is able to com-
municate in a shared language (mostly English). For the first time in history, online

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT