INTRODUCTION: WHITHER THE JOB, LONG LIVE WORK!

A perfect storm in the world of work may be forming. Consider the following dynamics. In the United States, the Affordable Care Act is projected to enable freedom from job lock, or the need to stick with an employer primarily for benefits, particularly health insurance (Dewan 2014) This comes on the heels of the Great Recession which has pushed many into “the independent workforce” a population some already consider undercounted, under-represented (Horowitz 2014) and likely growing (MBO Partners 2013, US Government Accountability Office 2006). Increasing automation and technical systems are giving rise to the possibility of extreme productivity and technological unemployment (Arthur 2011, Rifkin 2014). Peer-to-peer models for engaging with others are taking hold in arenas as diverse as consumption, education and services. Upstarts of the “sharing economy” are attaining mainstream status (The Economist 2013, Friedman 2014). The models and ethos of “sharing” and “open” are permeating the world of labor. Do these trends together spell the end of “the job” as we know it?

At least since Marx’s critiques of industrial capitalism and Weber’s “iron cage of rationality” in bureaucracy (1930), social researchers have long critiqued alienating, stultifying and manipulative forms of organizations and labor (Casey 1995, Graeber 2013, Gregg 2013, Hochschild 1989, 2003) and advocated for change. Push factors, such as retiring workforces (Aiken 2012), also challenge current work configurations as long-tenured employees, especially baby boomer generations, depart organizations taking their reserves of experience and knowledge with them. At the same time, emerging business models and technologies enable work to be designed and distributed in new ways. The organization as the pre-eminent industrial era site for harnessing creativity, managing production, and developing and disseminating the produce of business is under stress. Such tensions reverberate through the organization of labor for ethnographic praxis in industry as well. Calls to evolve the practice (Bezaitis and anderson 2011, anderson et al. 2013, Wakeford 2011) sit beside those who remain vigilant to the risks of market transformations of ethnographic labor (Granka and Larvie 2008, Lombardi 2009).

At the same time, collaborative and peer-based forms of labor organization are emerging, sharing in the ethos of DIY, maker, hacker and other open and peer movements. For some, these dynamics hold out the promise of freedom from institutionalized hierarchies, the autonomy to determine what work to do and how, and for the possibility to shape lives independent of dominant institutional forms. Others see these same dynamics as instead portending a kind of neo-liberal feudalism, the demise of job security and the shifting of the requirement for management to the worker. Not only is the threat of return to piece-work evident, but the generative value of organizational forms (eg., for protection, for mobilizing resources towards long-term ends) may be at risk. The worse thing indeed, except the alternative?

Systems for open and crowd forms of work are particularly keen sites for investigating what is coming of these dynamics. Open and crowd work systems enable the distribution of work through open calls rather than assignment. Whether deployed for employees internal to an organization (as is of particular interest here) or for freelance and cross-organization labor, the work done and how it is organized may be undergoing transformation. In general and consistent with the broader growth of service, platform-driven, API models of transaction, we are witnessing shifts from “acquiring” to “accessing”, even in the case of labor.

What is happening to the cultural meaning of the workplace and forms of workplace sociality that organizations engender? Drawing on experiences in studying, designing and using intra-organizational open and crowd work systems, this paper investigates changing relations between organizations and those who perform labor for them in the context of changing ways of organizing work. As explored by (Batteau 2001), organizational culture is made through constant processes of negotiation and management of ambiguities. But what happens when the target of affiliation is less the organization and more specific and often granular units of work? Is the assumption of the collective entity and identity of the organization changing through participation in crowd and open work?

Understanding changing meanings of the workplace, we argue, requires looking not just at the organization of labor, but the configurations of the work itself. How work is conceptualized, represented, disseminated, accessed, managed and performed, may be changing through use of these systems (Cefkin 2014, Anya et al. 2014, Irani 2013, Martin et al. 2014, Moore et al. 2014), demanding an even more intimate consideration of the experience of work and working. How do these experiments with alternatives to traditional staffing and assignment models impact the way organizational culture is imagined and enacted? In what ways do open and crowd forms of work enhance or detract from workplace sociality and from other aspects of organizational practice and workforce engagement? A deeper understanding of shifting engagement between organizations and workers – a relationship mediated through the work itself – advances understanding of potentially significant social transformations, allowing ethnographers in industry to sustain an active voice within the organization about the changing nature of society (Bezaitis 2012, anderson et al. 2013).

OPEN AND CROWD WORK SYSTEMS

By “open” and “crowd work” systems, we mean online applications that enable the distribution of work through open calls rather than through assignment or pre-defined job-role requirements. In contrast to the more narrowly defined terrain of online crowdsourcing most commonly associated with microtask labor, we include a wide range of mechanisms and event types within our definition. These systems enable work opportunities of a tremendously varied focus and scope to be announced openly and for people looking to perform work (“the crowd”) to find and perform it. They can vary in the degree of “openness”, from the world at large (or at least those with digital access and know-how) to a particular group of people, or even sub-group within a company or population. Depending on the form of the system, those looking to perform the work may simply claim it, apply to be selected to perform it, or submit completed work results.

Thousands of applications using these models exist. They range from specialized marketplaces supporting a single domain or practice (eg., HighSkill Pro for consultants, finance and legal professional, Freelance Physician for doctors, Petridisk.org for lifesciences), to general purpose intermediaries across a range of work domains (Elance-Odesk is perhaps the largest and best known of these), to volunteer and charitable assistance sites (eg., LinkedIn, Spark!), to outcome-based contest sites (eg., 99Designs for creative work or Innocentive for complex scientific and technical innovation development), to microtask platforms such as Mechanical Turk. Though some systems are designed only to support digital work, the model of open and crowd work can also support place-based labor. Task Rabbit supports finding people to perform errands and chores, OnForce provides local IT support, and the above-mentioned Freelance Physicians aligns doctors to hospitals. While the work is not digital, these platforms rely on digital capabilities for such things as matching, notification and communication. Participatory systems that allow the design and execution of complex work, such as those common to citizen science projects (eg., GalaxyZoo, or the contest-hosting platform InnoCentive), may well require attendant off-line work with other instrumentation and participants.

Another distinction is whether the system acts as an actual site for crowdwork or merely act as an intermediary for matching work efforts with specific producers who submit bids to perform the work (eg., Elance or Freelance.com. Some platforms allow microtasks while others provide support for complex work. Microtasking involves the decomponentization of work into tiny bits which can be disseminated, claimed and performed by people worldwide in the matter of minutes. Here work producers simply perform and submit the work rather than applying to perform it. A similar model plays out at the other end of the spectrum, the large contest platforms such as InnoCentive and Kaggle, which provide a platform upon which other entities (governments, universities, businesses) host contests aimed to solve large, complex challenges. The work is performed and a winner(s) selected. Even crowdfunding plays into these dynamics; people identify work to be performed (e.g., an art work or gadget to be produced) and solicit investment in the form of time and money from others to get it done.

In short, the diversity of forms, sites of application, and implications for the kind of work performed and how it is organized is significant. At the same time, as has been recently made apparent in the popular media, attention to such peer-based consumer systems as Uber, these are not just experimental or feel-good efforts to collaborate in new ways. Many are business enterprises with profit-making interests, which aim to support businesses in enhancing productivity and accelerating innovation. Indeed, the usefulness of these models for business operations is witnessed in the fact that open and crowd work models can be applied internally among full-time employees, as we explore here. IBM has utilized crowdwork platforms for the execution of componentized technical and creative work drawing on work producers both internal and external to the organization. Applications that enable people to post work requests to reach across organizational bounds but within the company at large are used (including a system the authors have been prototyping). Crowd-sourced ideation and problem solving “jams” where employees at large are invited to participate are common, as are hack-a-thons and other contest-based models open to all employees or those of a particular division. And a number of internal crowdfunding programs have been run, in which employees allot company funds to employee-created projects. Many of these are designed as much to extend participation and innovation than, for instance, narrowing costs. So while open and crowd work systems may portend further practices of neoliberalization (a worry that surfaces in the experience of participants, as we show below), they are not singularly about shedding jobs from companies or engaging freelancers. Even so, they do change the relationship to (and amongst) their consumers and workers. The line between consumers and producers, requesters and workers, blurs. We believe that a look at intra-organizational experiences with crowd and open work promises some of the richest cases for considering what the emergence of these forms of work may mean in terms of the cultural reimagining of work and the workplace.

DATA AND METHODS

We have been tracking the development of new work formations and the crowd work industry through secondary sources (the press, others’ research) and by engaging in online forums and public meetings. We also have conducted research in a variety of specific projects at IBM involving open or crowd forms of work. The particular role we played in these projects has varied. We have designed concepts for broader strategic consideration, analyzed the use of systems others developed, and made recommendations on design and use. We have also developed and tested technical prototypes that we designed.

Here we focus on data from three programs. All were used internal to the organization, engaging employees in working with their peers in new ways. One of them also included external participants. While each program opened up for broad input some aspect of the work, whether identification, selection and/or execution, the aims, forms and mechanisms employed by each varied, shaping the experiences of participants in different ways. We conducted interviews with participants in a variety of roles for each system, and observed communications and meetings amongst those supporting the efforts.