Documents Howcroft, Debra 12 results

"Crowd employment platforms enable firms to source labour and expertise by leveraging Internet technology. Rather than offshoring jobs to low-cost geographies, functions once performed by internal employees can be outsourced to an undefined pool of digital labour using a virtual network. This enables firms to shift costs and offload risk as they access a flexible, scalable workforce that sits outside the traditional boundaries of labour laws and regulations. The micro-tasks of ‘clickwork' are tedious, repetitive and poorly paid, with remuneration often well below minimum wage. This article will present an analysis of one of the most popular crowdsourcing sites -Mechanical Turk- to illuminate how Amazon's platform enables an array of companies to access digital labour at low cost and without any of the associated social protection or moral obligation."

"Waves of ‘new technology' have typically been accompanied by widespread speculation regarding their economic and social impacts. Most notably, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, computerisation and the microchip prompted cataclysmic predictions regarding their effects for employment. For example, the World Centre for Computer Sciences and Human Resources estimated that, by the end of the 1980s, as many as 50 million people would be displaced by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Braham, 1985, cited in Boreham et al., 2007: 3). In the aftermath of speculation on the ‘Information Revolution', whether dystopian (Jenkins and Sherman, 1979) or utopian (Toffler, 1970), New Technology, Work and Employment was established as corrective and as a forum for theoretically informed, empirically grounded research on the impact of technological developments on work, employment and workplace social relations. In place of grand theorising, then, the journal set itself the more prosaic but robust social scientific objective of describing, mapping and analysing emerging realities."

"Software work is often depicted as a ‘sunrise occupation', consisting of knowledge workers that are able to craft stable careers. The aim of this article is to question this account by analysing the experiences of mobile applications developers, with a focus on Apple and Google platforms. The analysis is situated in the context of wider socioeconomic trends and developments in product and technology markets, since these structures frame the working practices of software developers. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Sweden, the UK and the USA, the study reveals how changing market structures have given rise to increasingly precarious working conditions and unstable labour markets."

"Occupational health and safety (OHS) is under-researched in the sociology of work and employment. This deficit is most pronounced for white-collar occupations. Despite growing awareness of the significance of psychosocial conditions – notably stress – and musculoskeletal disorders, white-collar work is considered by conventional OHS discourse to be ‘safe'. This study's locus is clerical processing in the UK public sector, specifically Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, in the context of efficiency savings programmes. The key initiative was lean working, which involved redesigned workflow, task fragmentation, standardization and individual targets. Utilizing a holistic model of white-collar OHS and in-depth quantitative and qualitative data, the evidence of widespread self-reported ill-health symptoms is compelling. Statistical tests of association demonstrate that the transformed work organization that accompanied lean working contributed most to employees', particularly women's, ill-health complaints. "

"This article explores a neglected aspect of IT-enabled service work: the back office. The fieldwork study reveals how back office service work has been identified as suitable for ongoing reorganization and reconfiguration as firms respond to the pressures of contemporary capitalism. The article focuses on standardization as a means of facilitating organizational restructuring into shared service centres as highly skilled back office work is reframed as routine service work. Standardization is the vehicle that drives the commodification of the labour process as tasks are fragmented, quantified and traded in the global sourcing of services, allowing work to be lifted out of traditional organizational structures and placed elsewhere, or outsourced to other service providers. The study shows how this ongoing process is fraught with contradictions, problematically rendering people and place ancillary."

"Despite growing interest in the gig economy among academics, policy makers and media commentators, the area is replete with different terminology, definitional constructs and contested claims about the ensuing transformation of work organisation. The aim of this positional piece is to provide a timely review and classification of crowdwork. A typology is developed to map the complexity of this emerging terrain, illuminating range and scope by critically synthesising empirical findings and issues from multidisciplinary literatures. Rather than side-tracking into debates as to what exactly constitutes crowdwork, the purpose of the typology is to highlight commonalities rather than distinctions, enabling connections across areas. The framework serves as a heuristic device for considering the broader implications for work and employment in terms of control and coordination, regulation and classification, and collective agency and representation. "