Drawing from a critical synthesis of interdisciplinary literatures, this article presents the organisational landscape of online work platforms as embedding problems posed to ‘the crowd’ while holding clues for paths of resistance. Organisational mechanisms that underpin online work platforms paradoxically both deterritorialise and territorialise online work and encompass new processes of disintermediation and intermediation, producing unprecedented savings for firms while imposing precarity on crowdworkers. Online work platforms nonetheless have become a tool of ‘development’ in underdeveloped countries for ‘bottom-of-pyramid’ (BOP) populations, a situation I critically examine regarding unique organisational features. Despite principles of online work platforms that would seem to foster the deterritorialisation of work, close scrutiny reveals spatially differentiated labour markets, which matter because the implications for change and the affordances of the new digital infrastructure differ across contexts.
Agrawal, A., J. Horton, N. Lacetera & E. Lyons (2013) ‘Digitization and the contract labor market: a research agenda’, NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 19525, Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Amin, A. & N. Thrift (1995) ‘Globalization, institutional “thickness” and the local economy’ in P. Healy, S. Cameron, S. Davoudi, S. Graham, A. Madani-Pour (eds) Managing Cities: The New Urban Context , Chichester: John Wiley: 91–108.
Aytes, A. (2013) ‘Return of the crowds: Mechanical Turk and neoliberal states of exception’ in T. Scholtz (ed) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory , New York: Routledge: 79–97.
Beck, U. (2000) The Brave New World of Work , P. Camiller (trans.). Malden: Polity Press.
Beerepoot, N. & B. Lambregts (2015) ‘Competition in the online job marketplaces: towards a global labour market for outsourcing services?’, Global Networks , 15:1470–2266.
Bergvall-K→reborn, B. & D. Howcroft (2014) ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk and the commodification of labour’, New Technology, Work and Employment , 29: 213–23.
Brabham, D.C. (2010) ‘Moving the crowd at Threadless: motivations for participation in a crowdsourcing application’, Information, Communication & Society , 13: 1122–45.
Brabham, D.C. (2012) The myth of amateur crowds: a critical discourse analysis of crowdsourcing coverage. Information, Communication & Society 15: 394–410.
Burroni, L. & M. Keune (2011). Flexicurity: a conceptual critique. European Journal of Industrial Relations , 17: 75–91.
E Pluribus Unum (2014) ‘United States federal government use of crowdsourcing grows six-fold since 2011’, May, 7. Accessed June, 1, 2017 from http://e-pluribusunum.org/2014/05/07/united-states-government-crowdsourcing-open-innovation/.
Esposti, C, D., Albert & D. Evans (2012) ‘Enterprise crowdsourcing: changing the way work gets done’, Webinar , Accessed June, 1, 2017 from http://info.lionbridge.com/rs/lionbridge/images/Enterprise%20Crowdsourcing%20Webinar%20PDF.pdf.
Ettlinger, N. (2016) The governance of crowdsourcing: rationalities of the new exploitation. Environment and Planning A , 48: 2162–80.
Ettlinger, N. (2017a) ‘Open innovation and its discontents’, Geoforum 80: 61–71
Ettlinger, N. (2017b) ‘Reversing the instrumentality of the social for the economic: a critical agenda for 21st-century knowledge networks’ in J. Glückler, E. Lazega & I. Hammer (eds) Knowledge and Networks: Topographies and Topologies of Knowledge , Heidelberg: Springer series on Knowledge and Space: 25–51.
Felsteiner, A. (2011) ‘Working the crowd: employment and labor law in the crowdsourcing industry’, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law , 32: 143–203.
Foster, G. & S. Plunkett (2013) ‘“Freelancer.com” executive case: Australia’, World Economic Forum , Accessed May, 27, 2017 from http://reports.weforum.org/new-models-for-entrepreneurship/illustrative-executive-cases/freelancer-com-executive-case-australia/.
Gino, F. & B. Staats (2012) ‘The microwork solution’, Harvard Business Review , December, Accessed November, 03, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2012/12/the-microwork-solution.
Graham, M. (2014) ‘Internet geographies’ in M. Graham & W.H. Dutton (eds) Society and the Internet . New York: Oxford University Press: 99–116.
Hardt, M. & A. Negri (2000) Empire . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hayek, FA. (1945) ‘The use of knowledge in society’, The American Economic Review , 35: 519–30.
Huws, U. (2003) The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World . New York: Monthly Review Press.
Huws, U. (2016) ‘New forms of platform employment’ in W. Wobbe, E. Bova & C. Dragomirescu-Gaina (eds) The Digital Economy and the Single Market , Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies: 65–81.
Ipeirotis, P.G. (2010) Demographics of Mechanical Turk , archive@NYU, Accessed May, 30, 2017 from https://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/2451/29801/4/CeDER-10-04.pdf.
Irani, L. (2015) ‘The cultural work of microwork’, New Media and Society , 17: 720–739.
Irani, L. & M.S. Silberman (2013) ‘Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk’, Paper presented at CHI , ACM, April, 27–May, 2, 2013.
Janah, L. (2009) ‘Samasource: empowering the poor through remote work’, May, 27. Accessed May, 30, 2017 from http://www.slideshare.net/leila_c/samasource.
Kingsley, S.C., S.L. Gray & S. Suri (2014) ‘Monopsony and the crowd’, Paper presented at The Internet, Policy, and Politics , University of Oxford, September, 25–26, 2014.
Knight, K. (2016) Can you use Facebook? You've got a job in Kathmandu on the new CloudFactory. The Huffington Post , March, 5. Accessed May, 27, 2017 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kyle-knight/cloud-factory-nepal_b_2708129.html.
Law, E. & L. von Ahn (2011) Human Computation , ebook. San Rafael: Morgan & Claypool.
Lazzarato, M. (1996) ‘Immaterial labor’ in P. Virno & M. Hardy (eds) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 133–50.
Lehdonvirta, V. (2016) ‘Algorithms that divide and unite: delocalisation, identity, and collective action in ‘microwork’’ in J. Flecker (ed.) Space, Place and Global Digital Work: Dynamics of Virtual Work , London: Palgrave Macmillan: 53–80.
Lodovici, M.S. & R. Semenza (eds) (2012) Precarious Work and High-Skilled Youth in Europe . Milan: FrancoAngeli.
Loten, A. (2012) ‘Small talk: small firms, start-ups drive crowdsourcing growth’, Wall Street Journal , February, 12. Accessed June, 1, 2017 from http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204653604577251293100111420.
Lynch, M., D. Freelon & S. Aday (2016) How Social Media Undermines Transitions to Democracy , Washington: PeaceTech Lab.
Malik, F., B. Nicholson & R. Heeks (2017) ‘Understanding the development implications of online outsourcing’ in J. Choudrie, M.S, Islam, J.M. Bass, and J.E. Priyatma (eds) Information and Communication Technologies for Development . Cham, Switzerland, Springer: 25–36.
Massolution (2012) ‘Enterprise crowdsourcing: market, provider and worker trends’, Crowdsourcing Industry Report. Accessed March, 2, 2016 from http://www.crowdsourcing.org/document/enterprise-crowdsourcing-research-report-by-massolution-market-provider-and-worker-trends/13132.
Mcllwain, C. (2016) ‘Racial formation, inequality and the political economy of web traffic’, Information, Communication & Society , 20: 1073–89.
Merz, S. (2016) ‘Health and ancestry starts here’: race and presumption in direct-to-customer genetic testing services', Ephemera , 16: 119–40.
Metters, R. & R. Verma (2008) ‘History of offshoring knowledge services’, Journal of Operations Management , 26: 141–7.
Milan, S. (2015) ‘From social movements to cloud protesting: the evolution of collective identity’, Information, Communication & Society , 18: 887–900.
Milland, K. (2016) ‘Crowd work: the fury and the fear’ in W. Wobbe, E. Bova & C. Dragomirescu-Gaina (eds) The Digital Economy and the Single Market , Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies: 83–92.
Papacharissi, Z. (2015) Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics . New York: Oxford University Press.
Pavlick, E., M. Post, D. Kachaev & C. Callison-Burch (2014) ‘The language demographics of Amazon Mechanical Turk’, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics , 2: 79–92.
Prahalad, C.K. & S.L. Hart (2002) ‘The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’, Business and Strategy , 26 (1):1–14.
Prassl, J. & M. Risak (2016) ‘Uber, TaskRabbit & Co: platforms as employers? Rethinking the legal analysis of crowdwork’, Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal , 37: 619–51.
Raco, M. (1998) ‘Assessing “institutional thickness” in local context: a comparison of Cardiff and Sheffield’, Environment and Planning A , 30: 975–96.
Roth, Y., F. Pétavy & J. Céré (2015) ‘The state of crowdsourcing in 2015: how the world's biggest brands and companies are opening up to consumer creativity’, eYeka. Accessed June, 1, 2017 from https://en.eyeka.com/resources/analyst-reports?utm_campaign=csr&utm_content=1&utm_medium=act&utm_source=cpr&utm_term=en#CSreport2015.
Sandoval, M. & C. Fuchs (2010) ‘Towards a critical theory of alternative media’, Telematics and Informatics , 27: 141–50.
Sandoval, M., C. Fuchs, J.A. Prodnik, S. Sevignani & T. Allmer (eds) (2014) “Philosophers of the world unite! Theorising digital labor and virtual work: definitions, dimensions, and forms, special issue. Triple C: Communication, Capitalism & Critique , 12 (2):464–801.
Schmidt F.A. (2017) Digital Labour Markets in the Global Economy: Mapping the Political Challenges of Crowd Work and Gig Work . Berlin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
Scholz, T. (ed.) (2013) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory . New York: Routledge.
Scholz, T. (2016) Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy . New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Scholz, T. (2017) Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy . Malden: Polity Press.
Scholz, T. & N. Schneider (eds) (2017) Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet . New York: OR Books.
Shaiken, H. (1994) ‘Advanced manufacturing and Mexico: a new international division of labor?’, Latin American Research Review , 29: 39–71.
Sobré-Denton, M. (2015) Virtual intercultural bridgework: social media, virtual cosmopolitanism, and activist community-building. New Media & Society , 18: 1715–31.
Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. New York: Bloomsbury.
Stanford Crowd Research Collective (2015) ‘Daemo: a self-governed crowdsourcing marketplace’, UIST '15 Adjunct , ACM, November, 8–11, 2015.
Tamazashvili, E. (2012) ‘Online marketplaces – the pros and cons’, The Global Journal , June, 18. Accessed May, 27, 2017 from http://theglobaljournal.net/group/youth-and-social-development/article/742/.
Turfekci, Z. (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest . New Haven: Yale University Press.
Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life . New York: Semiotext(e).
Widmer, S. (2016) ‘Experiencing a personalized, augmented reality: users of Foursquare in urban space’, in L. Amoore & V. Piotukh (eds) Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data , New York: Routledge: 57–71.
Wobbe, W., E. Bova & C. Dragomirescu-Gaina (eds) (2016) The Digital Economy and the Single Market . Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies.
World Bank Group (2016) ‘Digital dividends’, World Development Report, Washington: The World Bank.
Xiang, B. (2007) Global ‘Body Shopping’: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry . Princeton: Princeton University Press.