Abstract
Digital microwork consists of remote and highly decontextualized labor that is increasingly governed by algorithms. The anonymity and granularity of such work is likely to cause alienation among workers. To date, we know little about how workers reconcile such potential feelings of alienation with their simultaneous commitment to the platform. Based on a longitudinal survey of 460 workers on a large microworking platform and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, we show that (1) alienation is present in digital microwork. However, our study also finds that (2) workers’ commitment to the platform over time may alter their subjective perceptions of alienation. Drawing from qualitative statements, we show (3) how workers perform identity work that might help reconcile feelings of alienation with simultaneous platform commitment. Our findings contribute to solving the paradox of worker commitment to precarious platform labor, which is an issue frequently raised in the digital labor literature.
Highlights
The emergence of digital work platforms facilitates new work modalities, where large projects can be broken down into series of small tasks that are distributed digitally to an anonymous global workforce before they are re-assembled to a final work product (Benkler, 2016; Duggan et al, 2020; Kittur et al, 2013)
The results of the quantitative survey suggest that alienation is present in digital workplaces mainly in the form of self-estrangement (2.63/2.75), meaninglessness (2.18/2.27), and social isolation (2.21/2.29)
We find that platform commitment (3.38/3.24) is quite pronounced across all items used for this construct in the structural equation modeling (SEM)
Summary
The emergence of digital work platforms facilitates new work modalities, where large projects can be broken down into series of small tasks that are distributed digitally to an anonymous global workforce before they are re-assembled to a final work product (Benkler, 2016; Duggan et al, 2020; Kittur et al, 2013) Such tasks (microtasks) typically include transcribing a snippet of hand-written text, classifying an image or categorizing the sentiment expressed in a comment (Lehdonvirta and Mezier, 2013). Duggan et al, 2020; Howe, 2009) and is facilitated by a growing number of online platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Clickworker Work within such arrangements takes place outside of organizational holding environments (Petriglieri et al, 2019) and is performed remotely, anonymously, and largely without human oversight or interaction. Meijerink and Keegan (2019) observe that the emergence of digital platforms may challenge or even eradicate the standard employeremployee relationship
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