Abstract
Since its very first appearance the concept of crowdsourcing has undergone major variations, coming to include highly heterogeneous phenomena such as Google’s data mining, exchanges on sharing economy platforms (e.g. Airbnb or eBay), contents production within creative communities online (e.g. Wikipedia) and much more. If one assumes a very broad perspective, it is eventually possible to extend the category of crowdsourcing to cover whatsoever phenomena involving the participation of the crowd online, as in fact has been done. On the contrary, I will argue that crowdsourcing – and in particular its microwork branch – represents the specific practice of extending outsourcing processes to a large, low-cost, scalable and flexible workforce, in order to generate greater added value for a supply chain. To develop this analysis, I will especially focus on the case of Amazon Mechanical Turk, and on how the operations carried out on this platform are primarily intended to manage the huge flow of information which spans across a supply chain. The practice of subcontracting to the crowd tasks previously carried out by employees or third-party suppliers highlights how crowdsourcing involves a reshaping of the supply chain, further extending it to a large network of individuals. Through crowdsourcing processes, companies are either able to replace or train AI, integrating human computation skills in algorithmic structures through simple, and oftentimes tedious, microtasks. In this context, processes of gamification are capable to put further downward pressure on already small piece-wages, as long as crowdworkers are rather willing to earn an even lower economic compensation, if it’s associated to challenging tasks; thus, to make a task more enjoyable through gamification could be an effective way to further reduce a supply chain’s expenditures in crowdsourcing, pushing forward labor exploitation practices structurally embedded in this phenomenon.
Highlights
This paper investigates global IT outsourcing and the structural bond between outsourcing and crowdsourcing
From my perspective, interesting in the early definition of crowdsourcing is exactly the suggested structural bond with classical outsourcing processes, of which it would represent a particular web-based configuration, which “allows firms to outsource and hire anywhere workers with a computer and Internet connection are willing to labor for pennies a task” (Kingsley et al 2014, p.6)
In the face of algorithm’s inability to adequately process certain information—such as recognizing an object in a photo, for instance—the simplest solution is to come back to human cognitive work, which, thanks to the brokerage of AMT, has no longer to be performed by a directly hired employee or a third-party supplier, but can be subcontracted to the mass of workers registered on the platform, reducing considerably the overall cost. This way of subcontracting is capable to integrate a large network of users, continuously reassembled in different arrangements, in a supply chain’s production cycle
Summary
This paper investigates global IT outsourcing and the structural bond between outsourcing and crowdsourcing. Since the world economy has witnessed the rise of global supply chains, outsourcing multiple functions to third-party suppliers has become a common practice—defined pervasive for their business by major corporations, such as Nike (Tsing 2009, p.148)—in the production cycle of many goods and services. Within this widespread process of corporate decentralization, the increasing reliance of capitalist industry on information technology has, prompted the growing importance of the IT outsourcing sector: it is estimated that the “global IT outsourcing (ITO) market has increased each year since 1989, when global ITO was only a US $10 billion market.
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