Towards a taxonomy of virtual work

Kaire Holts, null

doi:10.13169/workorgalaboglob.7.1.0031

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Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation

Volume 7, Issue 1

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Towards a taxonomy of virtual work

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Author(s): Kaire Holts

Publication date (Print): Summer 2013

Journal: Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation

Publisher: Pluto Journals

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Abstract

Whether they are used for real-money trading in massive multiplayer online role-playing games, on-line content production, working through crowdsourcing Internet marketplaces, modding, online gambling, playing human-based computation games, or just browsing, sharing files, and connecting with friends, online spaces have produced a wide range of new forms of activity. A growing number of scholars now refer to these as ‘new labour activities’, ‘virtual work’ or ‘digital labour’ or describe them as new sources of value creation for capital. Alongside these developments, new terms are emerging to describe the virtual workforce of which ‘gold farmer’, ‘prosumer’, ‘Turker’ or ‘microworker’ are only a few examples. Despite these new terms and categories, a coherent conceptual framework and understanding of what constitutes virtual work in more general terms is still lacking. No clear classification of this type of work yet exists, nor is there a clear distinction between it and the work that takes place in the ‘real world’. This paper explores the obstacles that prevent the construction of such a classification and creating a clear definition and taxonomy of virtual work.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (doi): 10.13169

Journal ID (publisher-id): workorgalaboglob

Title: Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN (Print): 1745641X

ISSN (Electronic): 17456428

Publication date (Print): Summer 2013

Volume: 7

Issue: 1

Pages: 31-50

Article

Publisher ID: workorgalaboglob.7.1.0031

DOI: 10.13169/workorgalaboglob.7.1.0031

SO-VID: 876c117d-0b94-4d5e-bde1-8ed5a1c21501

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All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Sociology,Labor law,Political science,Labor & Demographic economics,Political economics

References

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Beer, D. & R. Burrows (2010) ‘Consumption, Prosumption and Participatory Web Cultures’, Journal of Consumer Culture , 10 (1):3–12.
Bjerg, O. (2011) ‘Poker phases: Draw, Stud and Hold'Em as play-forms of capitalism’, ephemera: theory & politics in organization , 11 (4):450–465.
Böhm, S. & C. Land (2012) ‘The new ‘hidden abode’: reflections on value and labour in the new economy’, The Sociological Review , 60 (2):217–240.
Brabham, D. C. (2008) ‘Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving. An Introduction and Cases’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , 14 (1):75–90.
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Coté, M. & J. Pybus (2010) ‘Learning to immaterial labour 2.0: MySpace and Social Networks’, ephemera: theory & politics in organization , 7 (1):88–106.
Cubitt, S. (1998) Digital Aesthetics , London: Sage.
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Dibbell, J. (2006) Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot , New York: Basic Books.
Dibbell, J. (1999) My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World , New York: Henry Holt.
Evans, P. & S. T. Wurster (1999) ‘Getting Real About Virtual Commerce’, Harvard Business Review , November- December:84–94.
Fiedler, I. & A.-C. Wilcke (2011) ‘The Market for Online Poker’. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1747646.
Fuchs, C. (2012) ‘Dallas Smythe today – the audience commodity, the digital labour debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a digital labour theory of value’, tripleC – Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10 (2):692–740.
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Gorz, A. (1994). Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. Translated by Turner, C. London, New York: Verso.
Hagel, J. & Armstrong, A. (1997) Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities. Harvard Business School Press.
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire. London: Harvard University Press.
Heeks, R. (2008) ‘Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on ‘Gold Farming’: Real- World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games’. Development Informatics Group, Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester.
Howe, J. (2009) Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. London: Random House Business Books
Howe, J. (2006) ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’. Wired Magazine, Issue 14.06.
Huws (2014) ‘The underpinnings of class in the digital age: living, labour and value’. Socialist Register 2014: The Remaking of Class.
Ipeirotis, P. (2010a) ‘Demographics of Mechanical Turk’. Working Paper CeDER-10-01, New York University, Stern School of Business.
Ipeirotis, P. G. (2010b). ‘Analyzing the amazon mechanical turk marketplace’. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 17(2), 16–21.
Kline, S., Dyer-Witheford, N. & De Peuter, G. (2003) Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. McGill-Queen's University Press.
Kücklich, J. (2005) ‘Precarious playbour: Modders in the digital games industry’, Fibreculture, 5. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/index.html.
Lazzarato, M. (1996) ‘Immaterial Labour’. In Virno, P. & Hardt, M. (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press:132–146.
Lechner, U. & Hummel, J. (2002) ‘Business Models and System Architectures of Virtual Communities: From a Sociological Phenomenon to Peer-to-Peer Architectures’. International Journal of Electronic Commerce. Spring 2002, 6 (3):41–53.
Lehdonvirta, V. & Ernkvist, M. (2011) Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy. Washington DC: World Bank.
Malone, W. T. & Laubacher, J.R. (1998) ‘Are big companies becoming obsolete? The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy’. Harvard Business Review, Reprint 98508, September-October 1998:145–152.
Meek, R. L. (1973) ‘Studies in the Labour Theory of Value’, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Morini, C. & Fumagalli, A. (2010) ‘Life put to work: Towards a life theory of value’. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 10(3/4):234–252.
O'Reilly, T. (2007) ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’. Communications & Strategies, No. 1, p. 17, First Quarter 2007:17–37.
Petersen, S. M. (2008) ‘Loser Generated Content: From Participation to exploitation’. First Monday, 13 (3) March 2008. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/2141/1948.
Pybus, J. (2011) ‘The Subjective Architects: When Tweens Learn to Immaterial Labor’. Journal of Communication Inquiry . 35 (4):403–409.
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Rayport, J. (1999) ‘The truth about Internet Business Models’. Strategy and Business (1999):5–7.
Ritzer, G. & N. Jurgenson (2010) ‘Production, consumption, prosumption’, Journal of Consumer Culture , 10 (1):13–36.
Ross, A. (2013) ‘In Search of the Lost Paycheck’, T. Scholz (ed) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory , London: Routledge.
Ross, J., L. Irani, M. Silberman, A. Zaldivar & B. Tomlinson (2010) ‘Who are the crowd workers? Shifting demographics in mechanical turk’, Proceedings of the 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems , ACM:2863–2872.
Saxtona, G.D., O. Ohb & R. Kishore (2013) ‘Rules of Crowdsourcing: Models, Issues, and Systems of Control’, Information Systems Management , 30 (1).
Scholz, T. (2010) ‘Facebook as Playground and Factory’, D. E. Wittkower (ed) Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind? , Chicago: Open Court Publishing.
Smythe, W. D. (2006) ‘On the Audience Commodity and its Work’, G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (eds) Media and cultural studies: keyworks , Oxford: Blackwell.
Sotamaa, O. (2007) ‘Let Me Take You to The Movies: Productive Players, Commodification and Transformative Play’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , 13 (4):383–401.
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von Ahn, L. (2009) ‘Human Computation’ Computing Research that Changed the World: Reflections and Perspectives , Presentations from the March 25 Symposium. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_spfeat_vahn.php.
von Ahn, L., B. Maurer, C. McMillen, D. Abraham & M. Blum (2008) ‘reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures’, Science , 321 (5895):1465–1468.
von Ahn, L. & L. Dabbish (2008) ‘General Techniques for Designing Games with a Purpose’, Communications of the ACM :58–67.
von Ahn, L. (2006) ‘Games with a Purpose’, Computer , 39 (6):92–94.
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Zott, C., R. Amit & L. Massa (2011) ‘The Business Model: Recent Developments and Future Research’, Journal of Management , 37 (4):1019–1042.

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Amit, R. & C. Zott (2001) ‘Value creation in e-business’, Strategic Management Journal , 22:493–520.

[2] Andrejevic, M. (2013) ‘Estranged Free Labour’, T. Scholz (ed) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory , London: Routledge.

[3] Arvidsson, A. & E. Colleoni (2012) ‘Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet’, The Information Society: An International Journal , 28 (3):135–150.

[4] Bailey, K. D. B. (1994) Typologies and Taxonomies: An introduction to classification techniques , Sage University Paper Series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, series no. 07-102. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

[5] Banks, J. & S. Humphreys (2008) ‘The Labour of User Co-Creators: Emergent Social Network Markets?’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , November, 14:401–418.

[6] Beer, D. & R. Burrows (2010) ‘Consumption, Prosumption and Participatory Web Cultures’, Journal of Consumer Culture , 10 (1):3–12.

[7] Bjerg, O. (2011) ‘Poker phases: Draw, Stud and Hold'Em as play-forms of capitalism’, ephemera: theory & politics in organization , 11 (4):450–465.

[8] Böhm, S. & C. Land (2012) ‘The new ‘hidden abode’: reflections on value and labour in the new economy’, The Sociological Review , 60 (2):217–240.

[9] Brabham, D. C. (2008) ‘Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving. An Introduction and Cases’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , 14 (1):75–90.

[10] Cappelli, P. & J. R. Keller (2012) ‘Classifying Work in the New Economy’, ACAD MANAGE REV . July 24, 2012, Published ahead of print July 24, 2012. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from http://amr.aom.org/content/early/2012/07/20/amr.2011.0302.abstract.

[11] Caraway, B. (2010) ‘Online labour markets: an inquiry into oDesk providers’, Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation , 4 (2):111–125.

[12] Castronova, E. (2002) ‘On Virtual Economies’, CESifo Working Paper Series No. 752 , category 9: Industrial Organisation. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://ssrn.com/abstract=338500.

[13] Corney, J. R., C. Torres-Sánchez, P. Jagadeesan, A. Lynn & W. Regli (2009) ‘Outsourcing labour to the cloud’, International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development , 4 (4):294–313.

[14] Coté, M. & J. Pybus (2010) ‘Learning to immaterial labour 2.0: MySpace and Social Networks’, ephemera: theory & politics in organization , 7 (1):88–106.

[15] Cubitt, S. (1998) Digital Aesthetics , London: Sage.

[16] De Peuter, G. & N. Dyer-Witheford (2005) ‘A playful multitude? Mobilising and counter-mobilising immeterial game labour’, The Fibreculture Journal , 5. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-024-a-playful-multitude-mobilising-and-counter-mobilising-immaterial-game-labour/.

[17] Dibbell, J. (2006) Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot , New York: Basic Books.

[18] Dibbell, J. (1999) My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World , New York: Henry Holt.

[19] Evans, P. & S. T. Wurster (1999) ‘Getting Real About Virtual Commerce’, Harvard Business Review , November- December:84–94.

[20] Fiedler, I. & A.-C. Wilcke (2011) ‘The Market for Online Poker’. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1747646.

[21] Fuchs, C. (2012) ‘Dallas Smythe today – the audience commodity, the digital labour debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a digital labour theory of value’, tripleC – Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10 (2):692–740.

[22] Fuchs, C. (2011) ‘The contemporary world wide web: social medium or new space of accumulation?’, D. Winseck & D. Yong Jin (eds) The Political economies of the media: the transformation of the global media industries , London: Bloomsbury.

[23] Geiger, D., S. Seedorf & M. Schader (2011) ‘Managing the Crowd: Towards a Taxonomy of Crowdsourcing Processes’, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Americas Conference on Information Systems , Detroit, Michigan August 4th–7th 2011, Paper 430. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2011_submissions/430.

[24] Gershuny, J. (2000) Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society . New York: Oxford University Press.

[25] Goggin, J. (2011) ‘Playbour, farming and leisure’. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 11 (4):357–368.

[26] Gorz, A. (1994). Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. Translated by Turner, C. London, New York: Verso.

[27] Hagel, J. & Armstrong, A. (1997) Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities. Harvard Business School Press.

[28] Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire. London: Harvard University Press.

[29] Heeks, R. (2008) ‘Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on ‘Gold Farming’: Real- World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games’. Development Informatics Group, Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester.

[30] Howe, J. (2009) Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. London: Random House Business Books

[31] Howe, J. (2006) ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’. Wired Magazine, Issue 14.06.

[32] Huws (2014) ‘The underpinnings of class in the digital age: living, labour and value’. Socialist Register 2014: The Remaking of Class.

[33] Ipeirotis, P. (2010a) ‘Demographics of Mechanical Turk’. Working Paper CeDER-10-01, New York University, Stern School of Business.

[34] Ipeirotis, P. G. (2010b). ‘Analyzing the amazon mechanical turk marketplace’. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 17(2), 16–21.

[35] Kline, S., Dyer-Witheford, N. & De Peuter, G. (2003) Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. McGill-Queen's University Press.

[36] Kücklich, J. (2005) ‘Precarious playbour: Modders in the digital games industry’, Fibreculture, 5. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/index.html.

[37] Lazzarato, M. (1996) ‘Immaterial Labour’. In Virno, P. & Hardt, M. (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press:132–146.

[38] Lechner, U. & Hummel, J. (2002) ‘Business Models and System Architectures of Virtual Communities: From a Sociological Phenomenon to Peer-to-Peer Architectures’. International Journal of Electronic Commerce. Spring 2002, 6 (3):41–53.

[39] Lehdonvirta, V. & Ernkvist, M. (2011) Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy. Washington DC: World Bank.

[40] Malone, W. T. & Laubacher, J.R. (1998) ‘Are big companies becoming obsolete? The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy’. Harvard Business Review, Reprint 98508, September-October 1998:145–152.

[41] Meek, R. L. (1973) ‘Studies in the Labour Theory of Value’, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

[42] Morini, C. & Fumagalli, A. (2010) ‘Life put to work: Towards a life theory of value’. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 10(3/4):234–252.

[43] O'Reilly, T. (2007) ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’. Communications & Strategies, No. 1, p. 17, First Quarter 2007:17–37.

[44] Petersen, S. M. (2008) ‘Loser Generated Content: From Participation to exploitation’. First Monday, 13 (3) March 2008. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/2141/1948.

[45] Pybus, J. (2011) ‘The Subjective Architects: When Tweens Learn to Immaterial Labor’. Journal of Communication Inquiry . 35 (4):403–409.

[46] Quinn, A. J. & Bederson, B. B. (2011) ‘Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field’. In Proceeding, CHI '11 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,:1403–1412.

[47] Rayport, J. (1999) ‘The truth about Internet Business Models’. Strategy and Business (1999):5–7.

[48] Ritzer, G. & N. Jurgenson (2010) ‘Production, consumption, prosumption’, Journal of Consumer Culture , 10 (1):13–36.

[49] Ross, A. (2013) ‘In Search of the Lost Paycheck’, T. Scholz (ed) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory , London: Routledge.

[50] Ross, J., L. Irani, M. Silberman, A. Zaldivar & B. Tomlinson (2010) ‘Who are the crowd workers? Shifting demographics in mechanical turk’, Proceedings of the 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems , ACM:2863–2872.

[51] Saxtona, G.D., O. Ohb & R. Kishore (2013) ‘Rules of Crowdsourcing: Models, Issues, and Systems of Control’, Information Systems Management , 30 (1).

[52] Scholz, T. (2010) ‘Facebook as Playground and Factory’, D. E. Wittkower (ed) Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind? , Chicago: Open Court Publishing.

[53] Smythe, W. D. (2006) ‘On the Audience Commodity and its Work’, G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (eds) Media and cultural studies: keyworks , Oxford: Blackwell.

[54] Sotamaa, O. (2007) ‘Let Me Take You to The Movies: Productive Players, Commodification and Transformative Play’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , 13 (4):383–401.

[55] Spencer, D. A. (2009) The Political Economy of Work , Oxon: Routledge.

[56] Terranova, T. (2013) ‘Free Labor’, T. Scholz (ed) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory , London: Routledge.

[57] Thomas, S. (2011) 9 examples of crowdsourcing before ‘crowdsourcing’ existed , Memeburn: Tech-Savvy Insight and Analysis. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://memeburn.com/2011/09/9-examples-of-crowdsourcing-before-%E2%80%98crowdsourcing%E2%80%99-existed/.

[58] Thompson, P. (1989) ‘The Nature of Work: An Introduction to Debates on the Labour Process,’ London: Macmillan Education Ltd.

[59] von Ahn, L. (2010) Work and the Internet . Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://vonahn.blogspot.co.uk/.

[60] von Ahn, L. (2009) ‘Human Computation’ Computing Research that Changed the World: Reflections and Perspectives , Presentations from the March 25 Symposium. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_spfeat_vahn.php.

[61] von Ahn, L., B. Maurer, C. McMillen, D. Abraham & M. Blum (2008) ‘reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures’, Science , 321 (5895):1465–1468.

[62] von Ahn, L. & L. Dabbish (2008) ‘General Techniques for Designing Games with a Purpose’, Communications of the ACM :58–67.

[63] von Ahn, L. (2006) ‘Games with a Purpose’, Computer , 39 (6):92–94.

[64] Wang, P. (2006) A Marxian Analysis of World of Warcraft: Virtual Gaming Economies Reproducing Capitalistic Structures. Accessed on January 30, 2013 from: http://triciawang.pbwiki.com/f/marxvirtual.pdf.

[65] Zott, C., R. Amit & L. Massa (2011) ‘The Business Model: Recent Developments and Future Research’, Journal of Management , 37 (4):1019–1042.