solved [Key Words]Gig Economy, Platforms, Crowdsourcing, Freelancers, Work & Employment, Business

[Key Words]Gig Economy, Platforms, Crowdsourcing, Freelancers, Work & Employment, Business Models, New Technologies, Innovations.Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, People Per Hour, Lawyers on Demand, Deliveroo. [General Requirement]5500 Words, NOT including bibliography and appendices (Minimum 5000 Words)Harvard StyleStructure: Executive Summary (Overview of the key findings from the report): 500 Words Introduction: 300 WordsMain Content: 3200 Words (Approximately 800 words per assigned question)Final Discussion & Conclusion (Evaluation of the evidence with well-justified conclusions and main points of discussion): 1000 WordsPlease create CRITICAL ARGUMENTS and use SUFFICIENT academic references to support. (Reading list is indicated below) [The Task] The target audience for your report is CIPD
(The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), who would like
to commission an informed report analysing some of the key dimensions of
platform work, with a view to circulating this report among its
members. CIPD have specified that they would like the report to focus on
the following key elements, with a view to providing a series of
recommendations based on your discussion and analysis. 1. What
attracts people to platform working? What are the characteristics of
people working on platforms (e.g., full-time/part-time, male/female,
Global North/South, low-skilled/high-skilled, additional/main source of
income, etc.)? 2. What are the working conditions of platform
working (for example, skill levels, type of tasks, remuneration,
learning and development, career opportunities, social protection, and
employment rights)?3. What is the reach and effectiveness of national/international employment regulation for platform workers?4. Do platforms represent a ‘new world of work’? As
HR professionals, members of CIPD are highly familiar with work and
employment issues generally, but less familiar with technological change
and its impact on working practices. Please ensure that in the report avoid telling them what they might already know. [Background about the case study] This
case study will investigate platforms as a new form of organisation and
working practices. Twenty years on from the dotcom crash, a number of
big tech platform firms have emerged as the ‘leading edge’ of emerging
business models (Rahman and Thelen, 2019). These firms are perceived as
even more intangible than their predecessors – given the absence of
profitability, assets, real estate and personnel – which suggests the
construction of a plausible business model is crucial for building
legitimacy, developing a brand and reputation, and attracting
investment. The increasing popularity of platforms has seen
growing numbers of organisations using them to source predominantly
unpaid or low wage labour, in order to create new ventures or increase
profits. This method of sourcing labour uses Internet infrastructure to
leverage the crowd to contribute to tasks that could alternatively be
performed internally by employees or contractors. The term crowdsourcing
was coined in 2006 and was presented as a new level of outsourcing, in
that rather than offshore jobs to low-cost locations, companies can
outsource functions to an amorphous and generally large pool of
individuals using an open call over the Internet (Howe, 2008).
However, over time, this modus operandi has expanded to include more
high-skilled, highly paid tasks and activities, as some of the more
traditional professions (such as lawyers, accountants, and medics) shift
to platform-based work. While sourcing labour via platforms
undoubtedly appeals to some organisations, research has considered the
broader social and economic landscape in order to explain why firms are
attracted towards sourcing labour externally.Some relate the changes to
the rise of network organizations and increasing globalisation, while
others point to changes in work and employment patterns, ranging from
outsourcing and flexibility, the attraction of boundaryless careers and
the need to access the talent of increasingly mobile knowledge
workers.An alternative explanation could point to the more negative
aspects of changing labour markets that have witnessed rising
self-employment, the emergence of zero hours contracts, projectification
of work, and increasing job insecurity.This raises interesting
questions regarding the future of work and employment, such as: What are
the socioeconomic forces which are structuring the employment choices
that are available? What threats and opportunities do organizations face
when sourcing activities and tasks to platforms? How influential is the
platform-based business model? The aim of this project is to
investigate platforms as a new form of work organisation. The increasing
popularity of crowdsourcing has seen growing numbers of organisations
using digital platforms to attract predominantly low wage or unpaid
labour, in order to create new ventures or increase profits. This method
of sourcing labour uses Internet infrastructure to leverage the crowd
to contribute to tasks that could alternatively be performed by
employees or contractors (Brabham 2012). The term crowdsourcing was
coined in 2006 (Howe, 2006)
and was presented as a new level of outsourcing, in that rather than
offshore jobs to low-cost locations, companies can outsource functions
to an amorphous and generally large pool of individuals using an open
call over the Internet (Howe, 2008).
The most significant differences between crowdsourcing and a
traditional workforce centres on flexibility, scalability, access to a
broad range of skills and experiences at significantly less cost,
coupled with the lack of employment regulations and employer security. Many
authors view outsourcing work activity to platforms positively and see
it as an opportunity to both create and capture value with the sourcing
of labour/expertise for low reimbursement (Chandler & Kapelner,
2013; Djelassi & Decoopman, 2013; Hirth et al. 2013; Satzger et al. 2013; Scheitzer et al. 2012).In
the case of remote online working, platforms generate appeal since the
process of sourcing labour is highly organised, is not dependent on
physical location, thereby enabling the rapid scaling of work execution,
without any significant transaction costs or logistical hurdles.
Control is simultaneously ‘at a distance’ while remaining powerful when
directing work tasks and determining the level of remuneration.
Relationships are fleeting and largely anonymous, and there is neither a
legal nor moral obligation to provide social support for the workforce. When
crowdsourcing started to gain popularity, many of the activities were
not perceived as ‘work’ in the traditional sense, but interpreted as
socialising, blogging, or contributing towards creativity and innovation
(particularly on social networking platforms). By highlighting features
such as mass production and distribution with low monetary imbursement,
Howe (2006)
categorically relates crowdsourcing to outsourcing rather than
peer-production and co-creation.This distinction is crucial as it
contrasts with the more prevalent view of crowdsourcing which is
uncritically celebratory and praises its ability to ‘democratize’ idea
generation and production. Rather than romanticising crowdsourcing as
some form of creative commons, a number of platforms have generated
excessive levels of financial value for platform owners. As
platforms have become more established the scope has increasingly
diversified and numerous models exist. Popular examples include Airbnb,
which provides an online platform to allow individuals to rent out their
homes, rooms or apartments to visitors.Similarly, crowdfunding sites
such as FundedByMe have proved popular for reward-based, loan-based, and
equity funding for European entrepreneurs.These types of platforms have
generated media interest since they tap into popular concepts such as
collaborative consumption, community building, the sharing economy and
social enterprise.However, the focus of this project lies in the labour
aspect of platform work and so in order to separate it from examples
aimed at content creation or altruistic vocations the term platform work
will be adopted. These platforms differ widely with regard to the skill
level used, the complexity of tasks, the material/virtual nature of the
task, remuneration, and the levels of control and autonomy that workers
experience. Platforms function as a marketplace for the
mediation of both physical (such as transportation, logistics, DIY) as
well as digital services and tasks, although the majority concentrate on
digital/remote work.Of the platforms that operate in a virtual space,
some platform owners deal directly with workers on a one-to-one basis,
offering payment for specific tasks.However, a whole raft of
intermediaries has recently emerged. Some exist as facilitators of work,
such as Upwork, whose platform was set up a decade ago and which
liaises between businesses who post jobs and workers who operate across a
range of domains.In 2020, Upwork claim to provide over 5,000 skills
across more than 70 categories of work. While platforms such as
Upwork and People Per Hour are positioned at the high-skilled end of
platform work there are also numerous micro-task platforms, with Amazon
Mechanical Turk (MTurk) providing an emblematic case of a microwork
platform (Irani 2013).MTurk distributes tasks to a large number of
anonymous workers with Amazon mediating and selling work capacity.It is
well developed, commonly used, and initially cornered the market in
online tasks (Felstiner 2011).A number of intermediary organisations
offering consultancy services have emerged to provide ‘solutions’ for
AMT requesters to help ensure that employing a digital workforce remains
viable, particularly for large-scale corporations.In order to ensure
that the benefits of low cost and low commitment are not to be negated
by the effort required to manage the workforce, intermediaries – who
liaise between large enterprises such as LinkedIn, the US Army, AOL,
Coca-Cola, Walmart, Procter and Gamble – assist in clearly specifying
the complexities of tasks, hiring and communicating with workers,
inspecting output quality, and authorising payment.They also go some way
towards providing an ‘algorithmically-mediated work environment’
(Iperiotis 2012) with a more automated approach to the hiring and
managing of workers, thereby alleviating some of the problems of
scalability. Furthermore, employing the services of mediator firms
enables large corporations to create a chain of concealment which
obscures their identity, offloading the risk associated with paying
workers such meagre amounts.Many large corporations are built like
Russian dolls with multiple layers of concealment (Urry 2014) and
opportunities to obscure their work and employment practices are often
welcomed. Platform owners play a central, orchestrating role
within a network of firms and individuals and, when combined, come to be
collectively referred to as an ecosystem (Gawer 2014). Most platforms
are based on a tripartite structure where the ‘core firm’ develops the
platform upon which third-party requesters broadcast tasks to be
completed by externally sourced workers. These digital platforms have a
standardised technical infrastructure that enables activities to be
globally distributed and repeated efficiently and with regularity. The
interfaces are inscribed with assumptions and prescriptions that direct
the manner that the user is permitted to take.The opening up of
platforms to large numbers of external actors’ can stimulate network
effects, whereby value increases geometrically as complementary products
and services attract more users (Cusumano 2010), extend the installed
base of users, and further expand the market (as in the case of big-tech
firms such as Amazon, Apple, and Google).The very nature of network
effects leads to cumulative benefits as those platforms that make it
beyond a tipping point become hard to dislodge (Gawer 2009), resulting
in extreme dominance of a number of key firms.The enhanced market
position boosts its negotiating power with suppliers, who are drawn to
the platform given the access to a broad consumer base. The
very nature of platforms – virtual, global, and unregulated – means
operations may occur in one region while the parent company is
registered and geographically located in a different region.Given the
footloose and ‘borderless’ nature of crowdsourcing, these platforms lack
transparency, operating outside sets of legislation or regulation,
often going ‘off-state’ and not subject to democratic
oversight.Employment regulatory regimes have limited scope which leaves
firms to frame the interaction on their own terms. While this
unregulated environment undoubtedly appeals to some organisations,
researchers have considered the broader social and economic landscape in
order to explain why firms are attracted towards utilising external
labour.Some relate the changes to ‘transformational shift’, such as the
rise of network organizations and increasing globalisation (Huizingh
2011), while others point to changes in work and employment patterns,
ranging from outsourcing and flexibility, the attraction of boundaryless
careers and the need to access the talent of increasingly mobile
knowledge workers.Framing antecedents in such a way suggests power
relations are tipped in favour of labour.An alternative explanation
could point to the more negative aspects of changing labour markets that
have witnessed rising self-employment (The Resolution Foundation 2014),
the emergence of zero hours contracts (Brinkley 2013), increasing job
insecurity (Berglund 2014) and work intensification (Thompson 2013). [Reading List] Amazon #1 Bergvall-KÃ¥reborn B and Howcroft D (2014), Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Commodification of Labour, New Technology, Work and Employment, 29: 3, 213-223, . #2
Culpepper PD and Thelen K. (2020) Are We All Amazon Primed? Consumers
and the Politics of Platform Power. Comparative Political Studies,
53(2):288-318. doi:10.1177/0010414019852687 Apple and Google #1
Bergvall-Kåreborn B and Howcroft D (2013), ‘The future’s bright, the
future’s mobile’: A study of Apple and Google mobile application
developers, Work, Employment and Society, 27: 6, 964-981. #2 Froud et al (2014) Financialization across the Pacific: Manufacturing cost rations, supply chains and power, Critical Perspectives on Accounting. 25, 1, 46-57. Uber #1
Calo, R. and Rosenblat, A. (2017). The Taking Economy: Uber,
Information, and Power. Columbia Law Review, 117: 6, available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2929643 #2 Thelen, K, (2018) Regulating Uber: The politics of the platform economy in Europe and the United States, American Political Science Association, 16(4), 938-953. #3
Naughton J (2021) Uber’s UK supreme court defeat should mean big
changes to the gig economy, The Guardian, 27/02/21, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb… Other Academic Readings Regarding Platform Business & Gig Economy #1 Platform Business Model Rahman,
K.S. and Thelen, K. (2019). The Rise of the Platform Business Model and
the Transformation of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism. Politics & society, 47(2), pp.177–204. #2 Crowdsourcing Chandler, D. and Kapelner, A. (2013). Breaking monotony with meaning: Motivation in crowdsourcing markets. Journal of economic behavior & organization, 90, pp.123–133. #3 Crowdsourcing Djelassi,
S. and Decoopman, I. (2013). Customers’ participation in product
development through crowdsourcing: Issues and implications. Industrial marketing management, 42(5), pp.683–692. #4 Technological Platforms Gawer, A. (2014). Bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms: Toward an integrative framework. Research policy, 43(7), pp.1239–1249. #5 Open Innovation Huizingh, E.K.R.. (2011). Open innovation: State of the art and future perspectives. Technovation, 31(1), pp.2–9.