Crowds, Gigs and Platforms. An Integrative Review and Research Agenda on the Future of Online Work

Abstract

As organizations outsource jobs traditionally performed by employees to the ‘crowd’ – i.e. to an external, undefined workforce with very different backgrounds, skills, expertise, and cultures – through online platforms, we still lack a detailed understanding of the experiences of workers on these platforms and how platforms change individual work. We conducted an integrative literature review on the changing nature of work on online platforms, based on 64 papers dated 2006-2020. We identified three main research areas, related to (I) work characteristics, i.e. motivation to engage in online work, workers’ behaviors and performance, meaning of work; (II) the relation between workers and platforms, i.e. workers interactions with algorithms and control issues, such as algorithmic scores management; and (III) workers relations with peers, especially in online communities. For each of these areas we propose and detail future research directions.