The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Amazon Mechanical Turk and the commodification of labour
Abstract
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.
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“There are types of work which have been relocated into domestic spaces and are entirely online, such as the monetization of leisure interests as content creation (Thomas 2023), online crowdwork (Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft 2014; Hertwig et al. 2024) and digital nomadism (Aroles et al. 2020).”
From Reflections on Sociotechnical Change: New Directions for and Continuities in Research on New Technology, Work, and Employment (2026) · cites this paper as Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft 2014
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Cites
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Cited by
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control
Kellogg, K. C., Valentine, M. A., & Christin, A. (2020) · Academy of Management Annals · doi:10.5465/annals.2018.0174 · Cited by 2,732
Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy
Wood, A. J., Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V., & Hjorth, I. (2019) · Work, Employment and Society · doi:10.1177/0950017018785616 · Cited by 2,209
Flexibility in the gig economy: managing time on three online piecework platforms
Lehdonvirta, V. (2018) · New Technology, Work and Employment · doi:10.1111/ntwe.12102 · Cited by 550
Amazon mechanical Turk in organizational psychology: an evaluation and practical recommendations
Cheung, J. H., Burns, D. K., Sinclair, R. R., & Sliter, M. (2017) · Journal of Business and Psychology · doi:10.1007/s10869-016-9458-5 · Cited by 474
Keith, M. G., Tay, L., & Harms, P. D. (2017) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01359 · Cited by 319
Metadata
- Authors
- Bergvall‐Kåreborn, B., & Howcroft, D.
- Venue
- New Technology, Work and Employment
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2014-11
- Volume
- 29
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 213-223
- ISSN
- 0268-1072 (ISSN-L)
- 1468-005X
- OpenAlex
- W2168583926
- Cited by
- 256
- References
- 4
- FWCI
- 50.80
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
