Creative FreelancersOccupational Community and Crowdsourced Work

Abstract

In crowdsourced work arrangements, organizations source a global supply of contingent labor and rely on software applications to compartmentalize work tasks, monitor performance, certify the work product, and compensate workers. The literature on contingent work not only highlights individualized management of risk but also points to labor market intermediaries and occupations that structure contingent work experiences in lieu of employment relationships. The online meeting places of the occupational community structured collaboration among freelancers and, in doing so, acted as proving grounds for the development of occupational knowledge. Through a study of creative freelancers, the foregoing analysis shows an emergent structure of embedded exchange within an occupational community, one that complicates accounts of disintermediation or atomized exchange in crowdsourced work. In collaboration, they sent written and diagnostic feedback, as well as digital work products, to one another via the Internet.