Paradoxes, problems and potentialities of online work platforms
2017
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.
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