Making Crowdwork Work: Issues in Crowdsourcing for Organizations

Abstract

Existing approaches to crowdwork center around the unique ways in which work is sourced from the crowd, often emphasizing the kind of work characterized by hyperspecialized, microtask labor, such as that found in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. However, real work in organizations is complex and rich, and as crowdsourcing is increasingly used alongside mainstream organizational work, social, technological, human-factors and work practice-related challenges arise. This paper presents the preliminary results of a research study designed to investigate models and methods for effective organizational uses of the crowd. The results indicate that despite the growing trend in organizational crowdsourcing, its implications on the organisational work performance and human requirements are yet to be fully understood.