Management scholars’ perception of barriers and bridges to use crowdsourcing in science: qualitative research

Abstract

ABSTRACT Crowdsourcing in science is one of the ways of conducting scientific research which responses to the postulates of the democratization, openness, and inclusiveness of science. Although much is known about crowdsourcing in science, less attention is paid to the barriers to the use of crowdsourcing in science and how to overcome them. The purpose of this research is to identify barriers to the use of crowdsourcing in science from the perspective of scholars across management who have little or no experience in organizing crowdsourcing in science initiatives. At the same time, we identify bridges that reduce those barriers. We collected the data using unstructured interviews with 40 junior and senior management scholars who represent different academic ranks. We identified sixteen barriers grouped into six categories: individual, data, knowledge, delegation, quality, and financial barriers. Barriers refer to lack of trust in the crowd, scholars’ reluctance to be open to new things, methodological preferences, concerns about data being shared, data theft, insufficient knowledge of scholars, insufficient crowd knowledge, difficulties in communications, the discomfort of delegating tasks to the crowd, the possibility of the crowd abandoning the tasks, additional work resulting from the need to control and verify the crowd's work, a potential violation of methodological rigor, the feeling of wasting time, concerns about fees for crowdsourcing in science and the employee evaluation system. We also identified the following two bridges that help eliminate barriers and fosters the use of crowdsourcing in science: autonomy of scholars and university support.