Triangular love–hate: management and control in creative crowdworking

• Author: Annika Schönauer,Philip Schörpf,Hubert Eichmann,Jörg Flecker
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12080

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Management and control in crowdworking 43

New Technology, Work and Employment 32:1

ISSN 1468-005X

Triangular love–hate: management and

control in creative crowdworking

Philip Schörpf, Jörg Flecker, Annika Schönauer and

Hubert Eichmann

This article analyses the ways in which creative crowdwork

is managed and controlled within social and economic power

relations. It presents findings from a research project on cre-

ative crowdworkers focussing on aspects of management and

control. The research shows that the design of the platforms

and the strategies of their operating companies clearly struc-

ture the triangular relationship between platform, clients and

workers. In addition to bureaucratic rules and surveillance ex-

ercised by the platform, rating opportunities and other control

features utilised by clients strongly impact on crowdworkers’

time use, income and creativity and thus on their working and

living conditions.

Keywords: creative work, crowdsourcing, control, working

time, income, creativity, crowdwork.

Introduction

The emergence and dynamic development of information and communications technol-

ogies has had a vast impact on many aspects of creative work. Better and easier access to

the Internet as well as faster and more reliable network structures increasingly allow

creative producers to work online and connect themselves to clients from basically all

over the world, for example, via crowdsourcing platforms, such as Elance.com, 99de-

signs.com and Freelancer.com. This drastically affects creative production itself and

power relations between the creative producer and the employer/client. A core question

in this respect relates to how virtual work is managed and/or controlled by the clients

and which technical options the platforms provide through the platform design. In addi-

tion, creative workers’ agency under these particular circumstances is highly relevant.

Philip Schörpf (schoerpf@forba.at) is a researcher at the Working Life Research Centre (FORBA).

His research interests include sociology of work, virtual work, crowdwork, outsourcing and creative

industries.

Jörg Flecker (joerg.flecker@univie.ac.at) is a professor of sociology and head of the Sociology

Department at the University of Vienna, Austria. His main research interests include changes in work,

the labour market, transnationalization, digitalization, employment relations, and the political extreme

right.

Annika Schönauer (schoenauer@forba.at) is senior researcher and member of the management

board at the Working Life Research Centre (FORBA) in Vienna. Her research interests include work

organisation, work and information technology, flexibility, internationalisation in the service- sector

and working time.

Hubert Eichmann (eichmann@forba.at) is a senior researcher and member of the management

board at the Working Life Research Centre (FORBA) in Vienna. His research interests include work

organisation and working cultures, career biographies, quality of life, media use, new information and

communication technologies.

44 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Prominent examples of control are the widespread review systems used by most

platforms, e.g. to indicate the crowdworkers’ experience, reliability and skills. The way

creative work is being organised, managed and controlled online via crowdsourcing

platforms often makes it necessary for creative workers to adapt and react to a new

environment in which they have to accept a strict regime of restrictive structures.

Moreover, to gain positive reviews, they have to meet the individual demands of cli-

ents and subordinate their private lives under the logics of this particular labour pro-

cess. This ‘bundle’ of forms of management and control often requires the creative

workers to accept constraints to their private lives, unpaid work for good reviews,

high levels of availability or long working hours. However, the anonymity of the

Internet is strategically used by the crowdworkers for experimenting and learning on

a safe playground.

To examine the social shaping and the socially contingent effects of digital work, we

analyse the ways in which creative crowdwork is managed and controlled within so-

cial and economic power relations and the ways in which it can empower people or

make them vulnerable. The article presents findings from a research project on creative

crowdworkers focussing on aspects of management and control. The first part on

crowdworking and management control is followed by the presentation of the method

of the study. The next section contains the main findings regarding platform design,

control features and how clients and crowdworkers deal with them. This is followed

by a section on the consequences for creative crowdworkers in terms of time, income

and creativity. A discussion and conclusions section sums up the findings and pro-

vides answers to the research questions.

Crowdsourcing and control of creative work

Crowdsourcing means outsourcing, over the Internet, of tasks, which were typically

done by employees of a company, to an undefined group of potential contractors

(Howe, 2006; Hammon and Hippner, 2012). The number of crowdsourcing platforms,

posted tasks and people looking for jobs is steadily increasing (Frei, 2009; Barnes et al.,

2015). Observers argue that crowdsourcing increasingly is a ‘serious and innovative

form of creating value’ (Hammon and Hippner, 2012: 165), the ‘number of crowd-

sourcing activities is steadily rising’ (Leimeister and Zogaj, 2013: 7) and that ‘the future

of work will be profoundly altered’ (Hoßfeld et al., 2012: 204).

The form of Crowdsourcing we looked at is organised by online platforms that can

be described as new forms of labour market intermediaries acting as brokers between

the outsourcers or employers, who post tasks, and workers, who submit work (Kittur

et al., 2013; Barnes et al., 2015). On these platforms, workers have openly accessible

profiles and can apply for jobs or participate in contests. Preconditions for outsourcing

tasks over online platforms are a fast and reliable Internet connection, the possibility to

digitalise the individual work packages and clear task specifications. In the beginning

of crowdwork, the centre of interest lay on outsourcing micro jobs, requiring no specific

skills (Lehdonvirta and Ernkvist, 2011; Bergvall- Kåreborn and Howcroft, 2014). For

micro jobs, a high level of standardisation and modularisation is necessary; therefore,

work needs to be dismantled into tiny tasks that can be described explicitly. While

microwork marked the beginning of paid crowdwork, the field of application has

become more widespread and a substantial part of the offered tasks and services

nowadays can be assigned to the creative or cultural industries. Beside online platforms

addressing freelancers of different fields, there are platforms specifically designed for

creative occupations (e.g. 99designs, designcrowd).

From the outsourcer’s perspective, the advantages lie in the access to an enormous

amount of qualifications and creativity, the opportunity to profit from high flexibility,

lower costs and the easy termination of employment relations (Felstiner, 2011;

Shepherd, 2012). In theory, this mode of work offers the freelancers new job opportu-

nities, the possibility to be one’s own boss and to flexibly arrange working time,

including when and how long to work, which jobs to accept and which to decline