Identity and Roles

Participation in these three programs gave rise to reflections on people’s sense of self, constructs of identity and the social roles they play.

The crowdfunding effort invited participants to propose “any” project (as long as it was legal, and was not for the purchase of capital equipment so as to avoid undue accounting and taxation complications.) These projects and proposals, then, signaled to members of the lab what others found to be important. As participants considered what to support and how (eg., investing and/or volunteering), they necessarily judged their estimation of others’ proposals. By making transparent what mattered, people were confronted with the question of whether what others proposed fits their own expectations of the kind of work and workplace they aspired to be a part of.

In a number of cases, people’s identities as scientists in a research lab played into their evaluations. One proposer, a long-time Silicon Valley tech expert with experience across a range of companies, proposed to initiate a particular talk series in order to make the lab a more “researchery” place. “It’s important, I think, for a research place to have a kind of an economy of ideas as the basis, rather than an economy of products or an economy of business…. And a good way to determine that is how many speakers come through the lab and how well-attended they are.” He felt the results would speak for themselves about what kind of place this is, whether it a place worthy of the investment of scientists. “It goes to who we are.” (The proposal was funded.)

Another research scientist, in assessing whether to invest in a proposal for a community garden, wished the proposal were “more scientific”, by focusing on practices of field flooding, analysis of evaporation and optimized water use, or adjusting potassium levels with soil tests. Referring to lessons from his childhood in India:

My dad’s engineer used to say this when I was a kid, “It’s an engineer’s job to eliminate other engineer’s jobs.” Always optimization. It kind of sticks with you. You think this is the meanest, harshest thing to say. You are going to bring in more automation, you are going to take people out of a job. But you know you bring in automation, you optimize production. So its one of those things. And I didn’t see that.

Here we see how the evaluation of a project proposed by a colleague raised questions as to what was a worthy investment given the context of the scientific lab and the worldviews of this scientist, informed by a childhood in India, and which drives his own scientific efforts.Encounters with the proposals of peers in the crowdfunding initiative gave rise to questions of belonging, a chance to ask: Do I/my peers belong here?, questions prompted by the open and visible participant-driven approach of the program.

The marketplace rested on the willingness of employees both to make aspects of their work available to others (“work requesters”) and to opt in to work on others’ projects (“work producers”). One question is why work producers choose to perform work for others when it wasn’t a job requirement? ¹ We heard a range of reasons for why people opted in as workers. A participant in China aimed to increase opportunities to perform change management work, which is her preferred kind of work but is something she rarely has an opportunity to do in China. An employee in India, faces a one month code-freeze, and as an “industrious person” who likes to stay busy, he looked to the marketplace as a valid and interesting way to do so. Another participant who described himself as “all about efficiency” described being turned off by requests that appeared too bureaucratic or ill-composed. “And I think, okay, what are they really trying to accomplish here? And what is actually going to happen? And I think nothing. Nothing’s going to happen and it’s going to be frustrating. Close it. Move on to the next one.” Others were attracted by the potential to try out new kinds of work, to expand their horizon. Each of these demonstrates how encountering options for the kind of work they could perform encouraged a reflection on who they understood themselves to be and what mattered.

For external, paid workers in the crowdwork system², the theme of “flexibility” emerged strongly – the ability to work remotely and outside organizational bounds in order to fulfill, for instance, the role of father and husband by managing a work-at-home arrangement. One participant felt his engagement gave him a chance to think about and figure out how to solve complex problems whereas another took it as a chance to focus on a particular kind of work he already knows well. Both reveal ways in which the opportunity to select their work encouraged their reflection on the kind of worker they understood themselves to be. The preference of the latter participant offers a valuable comparison to the lives of those enmeshed in the social configurations of traditional organizational life. He specifically contrasted the kind of work he likes with that which he does not, namely, being a “team lead” where he’d be expected to take on additional responsibilities. A hallmark of traditional employment is the performance appraisal. This appraisal typically includes a factor considering evaluating leadership potential, and the expectation that “successful” workers are those that demonstrate leadership ability is not uncommon. “In personnel actions and judgments, we see the embodiment of an organization’s cultures, resolving the contradictions of command and inclusion. The individuals who make up the organization are the signposts of its values, artifacts of this resolution.” (Batteau 2001, p. 735) While there was a reputation system built into the crowdwork program, it was based on people’s record in being selected or completing the work as asked for in the system. Being a crowd worker gave him a chance to avoid the kind of evaluation he might face internal to organization.

We also saw evidence of how these arrangements could be in tension with people’s professional identities. For example, the crowd work system is designed to support short-term execution work. The question of how to ensure quality work surfaced repeatedly and is in fact one of the most frequent topics more generally in discussions of crowdsourcing. In contrast to a common view that crowd workers are trying to get by with minimal effort and game the system, said one participant “I don’t like to deliver poor quality work because I’ve been in IT long enough to know that if that happens, someone somewhere is going to wear it. And that I guess is my empathy with the general IT population that we shouldn’t let each other down like that.”

We see then in this section some of the ways in which open and crowd work systems are impacting workers’ identities and roles. In each case, encounters with others’ ideas and with potential work to be performed caused them to reflect on their own sense of self, their own priorities. Overall the open and crowd work systems encourage people to re-imagine their identities and roles, from what it means to be “industrious”, to being a “research scientist” or a “software developer”, a “father” or “team lead.”

Relations and Work

Open and crowd work mechanisms also have the potential to shift the way people experience and enact their relationships with others in the workplace and with their organization.

The crowdwork system we investigated was developed to fit with existing organizational processes; it was designed to take small bits of work that would have previously been done by a “retained team” of IT service delivery personnel and put them out to the crowd who was either elsewhere inside of or external to the organization. In this kind of system, participants enter into a requester-producer relationship. As the crowd workers were not part of the retained team, it gave rise to the need to manage an “insider-outsider” relationship, creating at times an “us and them” relationship on the job. The expressed wish by an external worker that all the communications between requesters and workers would happen through the provided online forum so as to ensure transparency and fairness illuminates this point, and is contrasted to the complaint of a work requester: “That’s one of the things that has really killed us, in that you know you can’t pick up the phone, you can’t send ’em [an instant message], they’re not invited to your meetings, they’re not part of your team, they’re kind of a one-off contractor that you really can’t- … collaborate with on a real-time basis.” Referring to the kind of insider knowledge gained through full-employment and longer term collaborations as “tribal knowledge,” another remark by requesters was the difficulty in specifying the work requirements. One requester said, “…there’s lots of shortcuts you can take when you’re using a member of your own team, from the level of details to the terminology to use….” The crowd workers lacked the tribal knowledge that the retained team members shared by virtue of working together over time (see Moore et al., 2014 for a related analysis). Consequently, communicating with crowd workers, compared to retained team members, tends to require extensive articulation of background knowledge that working teams can take for granted. This led requesters to complain continually about the unmeasured overhead required in writing detailed work specifications for crowdworkers.

Despite this divide between “team members” and crowd workers and the anonymous representation of crowd workers (known only by aliases), relationships did develop between requesters and producers. Anonymity is not the same as being without relationship. (See also Martin et al., 2014.) A telling example surfaced in a discussion we observed amongst requesters. Suspecting the producer had simply uploaded the wrong final document, a requester had tried to reach out to the participant to correct the error, but she received no response. When others asked which producer it was, the others’ agreed that this seemed uncharacteristic for this worker and began suggesting different ways of trying to follow up. They worried, the worker may have “fallen off the face of the earth”, and wondered if perhaps he or she had taken a full-time job and was not longer working through the system.

Further, the crowdwork system provided a bridge between the organization and those who had previously been employed there. Said one worker who left to be a stay-at-home dad while his wife returned to work, “I’ve had such a long association with IBM. It allows me to maintain that sense of community that I’ve had previously…. It allows me to continue the relationships that I’ve already established.” At the same time, the crowdwork system is a far cry from a sociable workplace, as was already suggested in the earlier comments about the limits of communication. Said one crowd worker: “You don’t build relationships for just doing work, piece work. It’s almost like being in a factory sometimes and the work is coming down the conveyor belt. You don’t know the people who sent it down the conveyor belt and you don’t really know where it’s going after that… It [crowdwork] is a fairly soulless industry.”

In the crowdfunding system, one of the most common criteria used to evaluate investment options was consideration of who would benefit from the project. People evaluated the proposals in terms of their “altruistic” nature or their degree of “selfishness”,for instance. The proposal for an offsite event for a particular group within the lab caused some to view it as counter to the spirit of the program. Summarizing a general view, one investor stated: “My view on it is that if it has a larger focus- a lab-wide focus, the return on my investment is greater. More people are impacted hopefully positively and that was a better funding choice than something that was really very narrow and specific.”However, what specifically constituted an adequate “lab-wide focus” was a matter of interpretation. Indeedemployee’s perceptions of each other’s proposals became the basis for reflecting on similarities and differences within the lab. In some cases this may have enlarged a sense of difference between people, differences that would have otherwise remained submerged. For instance, as a chemist’s response to many of the computer-science-driven analytics projects was: “They don’t get what I do, I don’t get what they do.” Other people experienced the range of projects instead as an expression of a more general sense of commonality or shared interest. The proposal to host an offsite event open to one segment of the population evoked feelings on both sides. Whereas numerous participants felt it was not worth their own investment and was even counter to the collectivist spirit of the initiative, others acknowledged its scientific merit, and felt it worthy of support even if they wouldn’t directly benefit.

The marketplace for change management activities was designed in part to overcome cross-divisional barriers; participants were united in their common orientation to and use of the change management methodology across regions, divisions, and roles. In the pilot we found that work requesters and producers indeed reached beyond regional and organizational lines, and prior work relationships. We did not find work producers filtering for or targeting opportunities based on whether they knew of the work requester or not. Similarly, work requesters expressed satisfaction in selecting people to work with who were previously completely unknown to them. “I think there is a big difference [working through the marketplace]” commented one work producer, “it’s – normally, it’s who you know and who you’ve spoken to, where you would get to do interesting work, to be honest. It’s not as open as this one is. And the fact that I can work with people from across the globe […] it seems more open, more transparent way of getting work or even finding out about it […] This is direct interaction with the requester and I think it’s fantastic, its a great concept.”As in thecrowd work system, then, the marketplace included a dimension of managing outsider status. However whereas before we heard more clearly of the limitations of that challenge, here that possibility is rendered more optimistically. “I don’t know their background, they don’t know mine…. So it was kind of leap of faith” said one participant, “It’s very rare for me to work with someone who has no idea of who I am. That is very brave of them…”

In this section, we see how some open and crowd systems are impacting the relationships among workers. The crowdwork system created somewhat of a sense of “us and them” as teams of employees coordinate their work activities with external individuals whose availability is less predictable, and yet at the same time prompted participants to recognize other, perhaps more basic forms of commonality. Organizational crowdfunding enabled employees to initiate new projects affecting their fellow employees, as well as, to support each others’ proposals through a nontraditional form of participatory budgeting. And the marketplace enabled employees to collaborate with colleagues across the organization whom they would not have otherwise met. Overall, these systems are reshaping the workers’ networks of colleagues both within and without the organization.