Abstract
Drawing from a critical synthesis of interdisciplinary literatures, this article presents the organisational landscape of online work platforms as embedding problems posed to ‘the crowd’ while holding clues for paths of resistance. Organisational mechanisms that underpin online work platforms paradoxically both deterritorialise and territorialise online work and encompass new processes of disintermediation and intermediation, producing unprecedented savings for firms while imposing precarity on crowdworkers. Online work platforms nonetheless have become a tool of ‘development’ in underdeveloped countries for ‘bottom-of-pyramid’ (BOP) populations, a situation I critically examine regarding unique organisational features. Despite principles of online work platforms that would seem to foster the deterritorialisation of work, close scrutiny reveals spatially differentiated labour markets, which matter because the implications for change and the affordances of the new digital infrastructure differ across contexts.
Highlights
This article extends the critical literature on asymmetrical power relations by relationally considering the organisational principles that drive the labour regime as potential targets for resistance, and further, identifying the paradox of spatially differentiated labour markets in a context of work that is, in principle, deterritorialised
Drawing from a critical synthesis of interdisciplinary literatures, I present the organisational landscape of online work platforms – its configuration of power relations and spatial differentiation – as embedding devastating problems posed to ‘the crowd’ while holding clues for paths of resistance
By ‘organisation’, I refer to the configuration of power relations, which has been the main target of critical literature (e.g. Felsteiner, 2011; Aytes, 2013; Bergvall-Kåreborn & Howcroft, 2014; Beerepoot & Lambregts, 2015; Irani, 2015; Ettlinger, 2016; Huws, 2016; Milland, 2016), as well as the way in which the regime of online work platforms has unfolded spatially across the global economy
Summary
This article extends the critical literature on asymmetrical power relations by relationally considering the organisational principles that drive the labour regime as potential targets for resistance, and further, identifying the paradox of spatially differentiated labour markets in a context of work that is, in principle, deterritorialised. Social mediators connect the local crowd with requesters or their mediators in ‘developed’ countries seeking cheap cognitive labour for microtasks analogous to governments courting transnational firms to locate branch plants at lowest cost in their countries in previous rounds of global investment; the advantages to firms of crowdsourcing and online work platforms in particular over branch plants or outsourcing to independent contractors are the tremendous cost savings in search, transactions, space, as well as transportation and labour costs.
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