Requestor, Platform and Worker: The Digital Brave New World of Labor Relations

Starting point and research context:

Platform work differs from traditional employment structures, for example, it is associated with increased autonomy, but also with risks of precarization. This is attributed to the special characteristics of the platform economy, such as the platforms' abundance of power, technical management and control of work, and deficient state and association regulation (Srnicek 2017; Crouch 2019). Nevertheless, research gaps exist in that these interdependencies have only been theoretically conceptualized and empirically investigated to a limited extent. For example, most studies have a small number of cases, focus on one platform or only have a specific geographical area of reference.

Research questions:

Against this background, the project “Client, platform and employee: The brave new world of digital labor relations?” examines the phenomenon of work on clickwork platforms and highly skilled design or IT service platforms in a comparative transnational mixed-methods design and asks two overarching questions:

• What types/groups of crowdworkers are there?
• How do crowdworkers in different spatial contexts differ in terms of their work orientations, motivations and attitudes towards platform work?

Methodology:

We approach the complex design of the research object in a “convergent design” (Creswell & Plano Clark 2018). The two strands of research run as independently of each other as possible and the results are only brought together during interpretation. The selection of the platforms (Amazon Mechanical Turk and Upwork) and countries (USA, Germany and India) to be compared is based on the preliminary considerations that the above problems differ due to the different educational levels and socio-demographic backgrounds of the crowdworkers. To this end, we draw on world systems theory to generate data from different socio-demographic circumstances. An online survey with a cross-sectional design is used for the quantitative study. The survey is conducted directly on the platforms as a job. We are aiming for an evaluation using multivariate cluster analysis (Backhaus et al. 2016). At the same time, people from the pool of quantitative respondents will be asked to take part in narrative-oriented individual interviews (Schütze 1983), which will be analyzed using the documentary method (Nohl 2009) in the sense of sociogenetic type formation.

Research funding and duration:

The research project is funded as part of the research funding budget of the Rectorate of Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The research project runs from May 2023 to December 2024.

Presentations and publications:

• (2023) Witzak, P., Korn, A. and Hertwig, M.: Crowdworker*innen im internationalen Vergleich: Ein Mixed-Methods Analysemodell zur Typologisierung von Arbeitsorientierungen. 18th Berlin Methods Meeting, Berlin.(https://berliner-methodentreffen.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Poster-Witzak.pdf)
• ILERA 20th Triennial World Congress, Symposium „Wenn der Algorithmus der Boss ist"(http://www.leraoffice.org/php/program.php) 

                  Markus Hertwig, Anna Korn and Patrick Witzak, Ruhr University Bochum: Antecedents of Collective Action in the Gig Economy: Crowd Workers' Orientations and (Sub-)Communities.

                 - Karol Muszynski, University of Warsaw/KU Leuven; and Valeria Pulignano, KU Leuven: Why Labour Platforms Use Different Employment Arrangements? Evidence from Belgium.

                 - Discussant: Leonard Geyer, European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research

                 - Chair: Patrick Witzak

Project management:

Dr. Patrick Witzak & Prof. Dr. Markus Hertwig

Project processing:

Anna Korn M.A. & Dr. Patrick Witzak