Accounting for Digital Variability in Crowd Work

Abstract

Our AMICS TREO paper started the conversation regarding the digital variability that exists in different types of crowd work enabled by online platforms, such as Uber, Instacart, Upwork, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) (Taylor et al., 2020). We argued that the degree to which online platforms digitize their work elements (e.g., tasks, assets, governance, and support services) is germane to understanding how crowd work differs among these platforms. Here we seek to extend this dialogue by highlighting three areas of consideration. These considerations will sharpen the focus of future crowd work research by making the digital variability a central character in information systems (IS) research.