Organizing Work on Creative Crowdwork Platforms: A Practice Perspective

Organization and design of work have always been on the agenda of IS scholars and so far, we have learned quite a lot about how traditional work is organized (Spreitzer et al., 2017). However, the world of work is changing rapidly with the proliferation of advanced information technologies, particularly the increasing popularity of platform-mediated work which is also known as crowdwork and the gig economy. However, although platformmediated work is the fastest growing segment in the alternative workforce (Katz and Krueger, 2019), there is little beyond anecdotal evidence as to how work is organized on these platforms. This work-in-progress paper tries to address this void by offering an empirical examination of paid, online crowdwork as a new model of work arrangement organized via online platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork and Topcoder. Broadly, there are two types of crowdwork projects: those involving routine and micro tasks, which are usually repetitive with low level of skill necessity, minimal payment and very short time frames (e.g., tagging pictures); and those involving more creative, complex, professional, and long-term tasks such as web development with higher payment for workers (Gol et al, 2018). This paper focuses on the creative crowdwork, as it requires elaborated information processing activities such as data collection, task design, ideation, solution finding, and teamwork (Thuan et al., 2015) and, thus, also requires intricate organization that can handle the inherent socio-technical complexity.