A Perfect Storm? Reimagining Work in the Era of the End of the Job

INTRODUCTION: WHITHER THE JOB, LONG LIVE WORK!

A perfect storm in the world of work may be forming. Consider the following dynamics. In the United States, the Affordable Care Act is projected to enable freedom from job lock, or the need to stick with an employer primarily for benefits, particularly health insurance (Dewan 2014) This comes on the heels of the Great Recession which has pushed many into “the independent workforce” a population some already consider undercounted, under-represented (Horowitz 2014) and likely growing (MBO Partners 2013, US Government Accountability Office 2006). Increasing automation and technical systems are giving rise to the possibility of extreme productivity and technological unemployment (Arthur 2011, Rifkin 2014). Peer-to-peer models for engaging with others are taking hold in arenas as diverse as consumption, education and services. Upstarts of the “sharing economy” are attaining mainstream status (The Economist 2013, Friedman 2014). The models and ethos of “sharing” and “open” are permeating the world of labor. Do these trends together spell the end of “the job” as we know it?

At least since Marx’s critiques of industrial capitalism and Weber’s “iron cage of rationality” in bureaucracy (1930), social researchers have long critiqued alienating, stultifying and manipulative forms of organizations and labor (Casey 1995, Graeber 2013, Gregg 2013, Hochschild 1989, 2003) and advocated for change. Push factors, such as retiring workforces (Aiken 2012), also challenge current work configurations as long-tenured employees, especially baby boomer generations, depart organizations taking their reserves of experience and knowledge with them. At the same time, emerging business models and technologies enable work to be designed and distributed in new ways. The organization as the pre-eminent industrial era site for harnessing creativity, managing production, and developing and disseminating the produce of business is under stress. Such tensions reverberate through the organization of labor for ethnographic praxis in industry as well. Calls to evolve the practice (Bezaitis and anderson 2011, anderson et al. 2013, Wakeford 2011) sit beside those who remain vigilant to the risks of market transformations of ethnographic labor (Granka and Larvie 2008, Lombardi 2009).

At the same time, collaborative and peer-based forms of labor organization are emerging, sharing in the ethos of DIY, maker, hacker and other open and peer movements. For some, these dynamics hold out the promise of freedom from institutionalized hierarchies, the autonomy to determine what work to do and how, and for the possibility to shape lives independent of dominant institutional forms. Others see these same dynamics as instead portending a kind of neo-liberal feudalism, the demise of job security and the shifting of the requirement for management to the worker. Not only is the threat of return to piece-work evident, but the generative value of organizational forms (eg., for protection, for mobilizing resources towards long-term ends) may be at risk. The worse thing indeed, except the alternative?

Systems for open and crowd forms of work are particularly keen sites for investigating what is coming of these dynamics. Open and crowd work systems enable the distribution of work through open calls rather than assignment. Whether deployed for employees internal to an organization (as is of particular interest here) or for freelance and cross-organization labor, the work done and how it is organized may be undergoing transformation. In general and consistent with the broader growth of service, platform-driven, API models of transaction, we are witnessing shifts from “acquiring” to “accessing”, even in the case of labor.

What is happening to the cultural meaning of the workplace and forms of workplace sociality that organizations engender? Drawing on experiences in studying, designing and using intra-organizational open and crowd work systems, this paper investigates changing relations between organizations and those who perform labor for them in the context of changing ways of organizing work. As explored by (Batteau 2001), organizational culture is made through constant processes of negotiation and management of ambiguities. But what happens when the target of affiliation is less the organization and more specific and often granular units of work? Is the assumption of the collective entity and identity of the organization changing through participation in crowd and open work?

Understanding changing meanings of the workplace, we argue, requires looking not just at the organization of labor, but the configurations of the work itself. How work is conceptualized, represented, disseminated, accessed, managed and performed, may be changing through use of these systems (Cefkin 2014, Anya et al. 2014, Irani 2013, Martin et al. 2014, Moore et al. 2014), demanding an even more intimate consideration of the experience of work and working. How do these experiments with alternatives to traditional staffing and assignment models impact the way organizational culture is imagined and enacted? In what ways do open and crowd forms of work enhance or detract from workplace sociality and from other aspects of organizational practice and workforce engagement? A deeper understanding of shifting engagement between organizations and workers – a relationship mediated through the work itself – advances understanding of potentially significant social transformations, allowing ethnographers in industry to sustain an active voice within the organization about the changing nature of society (Bezaitis 2012, anderson et al. 2013).

OPEN AND CROWD WORK SYSTEMS

By “open” and “crowd work” systems, we mean online applications that enable the distribution of work through open calls rather than through assignment or pre-defined job-role requirements. In contrast to the more narrowly defined terrain of online crowdsourcing most commonly associated with microtask labor, we include a wide range of mechanisms and event types within our definition. These systems enable work opportunities of a tremendously varied focus and scope to be announced openly and for people looking to perform work (“the crowd”) to find and perform it. They can vary in the degree of “openness”, from the world at large (or at least those with digital access and know-how) to a particular group of people, or even sub-group within a company or population. Depending on the form of the system, those looking to perform the work may simply claim it, apply to be selected to perform it, or submit completed work results.

Thousands of applications using these models exist. They range from specialized marketplaces supporting a single domain or practice (eg., HighSkill Pro for consultants, finance and legal professional, Freelance Physician for doctors, Petridisk.org for lifesciences), to general purpose intermediaries across a range of work domains (Elance-Odesk is perhaps the largest and best known of these), to volunteer and charitable assistance sites (eg., LinkedIn, Spark!), to outcome-based contest sites (eg., 99Designs for creative work or Innocentive for complex scientific and technical innovation development), to microtask platforms such as Mechanical Turk. Though some systems are designed only to support digital work, the model of open and crowd work can also support place-based labor. Task Rabbit supports finding people to perform errands and chores, OnForce provides local IT support, and the above-mentioned Freelance Physicians aligns doctors to hospitals. While the work is not digital, these platforms rely on digital capabilities for such things as matching, notification and communication. Participatory systems that allow the design and execution of complex work, such as those common to citizen science projects (eg., GalaxyZoo, or the contest-hosting platform InnoCentive), may well require attendant off-line work with other instrumentation and participants.

Another distinction is whether the system acts as an actual site for crowdwork or merely act as an intermediary for matching work efforts with specific producers who submit bids to perform the work (eg., Elance or Freelance.com. Some platforms allow microtasks while others provide support for complex work. Microtasking involves the decomponentization of work into tiny bits which can be disseminated, claimed and performed by people worldwide in the matter of minutes. Here work producers simply perform and submit the work rather than applying to perform it. A similar model plays out at the other end of the spectrum, the large contest platforms such as InnoCentive and Kaggle, which provide a platform upon which other entities (governments, universities, businesses) host contests aimed to solve large, complex challenges. The work is performed and a winner(s) selected. Even crowdfunding plays into these dynamics; people identify work to be performed (e.g., an art work or gadget to be produced) and solicit investment in the form of time and money from others to get it done.

In short, the diversity of forms, sites of application, and implications for the kind of work performed and how it is organized is significant. At the same time, as has been recently made apparent in the popular media, attention to such peer-based consumer systems as Uber, these are not just experimental or feel-good efforts to collaborate in new ways. Many are business enterprises with profit-making interests, which aim to support businesses in enhancing productivity and accelerating innovation. Indeed, the usefulness of these models for business operations is witnessed in the fact that open and crowd work models can be applied internally among full-time employees, as we explore here. IBM has utilized crowdwork platforms for the execution of componentized technical and creative work drawing on work producers both internal and external to the organization. Applications that enable people to post work requests to reach across organizational bounds but within the company at large are used (including a system the authors have been prototyping). Crowd-sourced ideation and problem solving “jams” where employees at large are invited to participate are common, as are hack-a-thons and other contest-based models open to all employees or those of a particular division. And a number of internal crowdfunding programs have been run, in which employees allot company funds to employee-created projects. Many of these are designed as much to extend participation and innovation than, for instance, narrowing costs. So while open and crowd work systems may portend further practices of neoliberalization (a worry that surfaces in the experience of participants, as we show below), they are not singularly about shedding jobs from companies or engaging freelancers. Even so, they do change the relationship to (and amongst) their consumers and workers. The line between consumers and producers, requesters and workers, blurs. We believe that a look at intra-organizational experiences with crowd and open work promises some of the richest cases for considering what the emergence of these forms of work may mean in terms of the cultural reimagining of work and the workplace.

DATA AND METHODS

We have been tracking the development of new work formations and the crowd work industry through secondary sources (the press, others’ research) and by engaging in online forums and public meetings. We also have conducted research in a variety of specific projects at IBM involving open or crowd forms of work. The particular role we played in these projects has varied. We have designed concepts for broader strategic consideration, analyzed the use of systems others developed, and made recommendations on design and use. We have also developed and tested technical prototypes that we designed.

Here we focus on data from three programs. All were used internal to the organization, engaging employees in working with their peers in new ways. One of them also included external participants. While each program opened up for broad input some aspect of the work, whether identification, selection and/or execution, the aims, forms and mechanisms employed by each varied, shaping the experiences of participants in different ways. We conducted interviews with participants in a variety of roles for each system, and observed communications and meetings amongst those supporting the efforts.

FINDINGS

In re-examining our interviews and observations from these projects, we see evidence of a number of ways in which open and crowd work systems are engendering workplace reimagining. We found that the mere fact of people having a chance to participate in these novel initiatives occasioned reflection and commentary on aspects of people’s working lives, from the nature of bureaucracy (“Things get lost in bureaucracy, people don’t want to stick their necks out”) and how crowdfunding has the opportunity to disrupt it (through the bottom up approach), to how people manage personal commitment vis-à-vis work, to the opportunities (or lack thereof) for personal growth and development. And we heard directly, and with some anxiety, reflection on what crowd and open models portend for the future of work more generally, such as the concern that making work beholden to the crowd will give rise to an ominous slippery slope of employment, “we’ll all be greeters at Walmart.” It may be that these reflections were especially charged given the internal organizational settings we observed, where these approaches contrast directly with more traditional and stable means of organizing work.

Here we look in more depth at three dimensions emerging from the data. The first explores indicators of how participation in an open and crowd work initiatives appeared to prompt reflection on the question “what kind of person am I?”, on people’s sense of identity as a person, worker, professional, and organizational member. The second extends from this to consider relational dimensions of work, how participation in these initiatives throws into relief workplace and organizational relationships and affiliations. And the third looks at authority and control. By definition, the move from work assignments determined by resource-owning entities to more open access and selection shifts the locus of control. It is this factor that leads some to optimistically suggest these forms are leading to greater democratization, and others to see them as the further commoditization of work.

Authority and Control

For systems used internal to organizations, the question of who authorizes the performance of the work emerges. The threat to managerial regimes is one of the potentially more profound consequences of these systems. Inviting employees to choose what work to spend time on disrupts management control over their labor.

Within the marketplace, the question arose as to who, if anyone, needed to approve employee’s time to participate. We could have designed the system so that when someone applied to a request, the system would route an approval request to their management before they could be selected. We proposed instead having the system route a notification to let the manager know that a member of their group had applied or been selected for a work effort, but not to track approval. If the manager did have a concern, they would have to take it up directly with their employee rather than having the system institutionalize and systematize that authority system. Indeed, none of the participants we spoke with voiced particular difficulty or anxiety around verbally checking with their manager regarding their participation, and a number brushed this off completely. “My discretionary time is my own, I don’t have to ask anyone.”

Producers in open and crowd work systems may enjoy greater control over the kind of work they perform. As we see in some of the statements above, in the crowdwork system we studied, participants selected those work requests for which they thought they could be most successful, would give them the greatest flexibility, or those that would provide the most interesting challenges. However, some requests are so specifically defined that there appears to be little leeway in how the work is performed. Further, requesters remain the final arbiters of quality. And the work was also performed under shorter term contractual commitments compared to traditional forms of employment. The fragility of this commitment played out from both sides. On the one hand, a requester indicated that they could “dump [workers] any time we want to,” that is, when there is less work for them to do or when budgets are strained. On the other hand, producers could also dump the requesters at any time. Another requester explained: “a guy that has been part of a couple of [work] events and allof a sudden he disappears. Okay, because there is no commitment. Okay, I mean he could find some other project he wants to work on, he gets bored with you, he gets pissed off, he just leaves.”Recall in the previous section a case in which a producer unexpectedly “fell off the face of the earth.” The crowdwork system prohibits long-term contracts between requester and producer, yet this is something that each party often seeks.

Members of a particular service delivery unit were mandated to adopt the system and tasked with distributing a fixed percentage of their overall workload to the crowdwork system. The effort it took to accomplish this successfully was not insignificant, and many were unhappy with being required to use the system. “There is an Executive Edict that says: Thou shalt do [Crowdwork].” As with any organizational mandate, the deployment of the crowdwork system reinforced these workers’ team leads’ and lower-level managers’ positional authority (or lack thereof) in the organization. This also meant that within the crowdwork system, the requesters themselves do not necessarily hold all the power.

The crowdfunding program departed from traditional structures of authority and control by enabling a novel form of bottom-up decision making. And there was ample enthusiasm from participants about that possibility. One participant offered a particularly philosophical statement:

I’m a big fan of letting people voice what they want. I think that the only way to ensure prosperity for the greater good is to ensure prosperity for the individual. …When you extrapolate that to crowdfunding then now all of a sudden you let individuals influence their immediate communities rather than, you know [headquarters] sending down policies for us, that you know, they are 2500 miles away.

In other words, the employees tended to perceive the crowdfunding program as empowering for them and not as just as another corporate initiative or stunt.

Some employees speculated that crowdfunding might be a way to counter some of the undesirable effects of the organizational bureaucracy and internal power relations of the workplace. One said, “… people always have vested interests, right… And so, you know, if it in any shape or form if there’s a feeling that it’s going to infringe on their territory then most likely they’re going to (nix) it, right… But doing it this way [crowdfunding] you probably – you can sort of minimize that, I think.”

At the same time, the crowdfunding program also required the proposer, and the team of volunteers they gathered (if any), to completely drive the project once it came to execution. So while this put a good deal of control in the hands of those proposing the work, it also put the onus more fully on them to complete it. This couldn’t be done, in many cases, without garnering support from some senior people in the organization, and gaining that support became part of the work. One year later, in fact, we see that not all the efforts which achieved their investment targets and were allotted funding have succeeded, suggesting that they may well have faced additional barriers in the doing of the work.

Crowdfunding also highlighted relationships of authority and control in the organization. Many proposed projects were in reaction to things that used to be available and no longer were, that people perceived had been taken away. Somewhere between a protest vote and an accommodation, the crowdfunding program was used as a route to shine a light on these losses, acting as a voice as if saying “hey, we want these things back!” The way in which the proposals themselves acted as signifiers of employee-organization relationships was expressed more wistfully in this statement by a long tenured employee evoking the ’good old days’ which he perceived as being more supportive of far-reaching scientific work: “You know, we have lost that … So in many ways this sort of enables at least the scientists in us to go and do something that is not really IBM’s bread and butter.” Another concern that surfaced was the worry that this form of decision making would substitute for other models of funding and decision making in the everyday work and the scientific efforts of the lab.

What I’m worried about is if they’re going to come, then all the research projects are going to go to some sort of approach like this…. You know, I mean we already have to justify our projects. I mean some of them are dictated out of need from [headquarters] internally. Others are not and we have to look for funding and bring money into the lab, but is it ultimately going to go to something like this? It’s kind of scary to think it would be.

In this section shifts in structures of authority and control were explored. In all three cases, employees gained some autonomy in pursuing opportunities of their choice. The marketplace helped people extend their network by working with previously unknown colleagues across the organization. In the case of organizational crowdwork, producers exercise a degree of control in deciding which work requests to accept, and in theory, in how that work was performed. However standards of acceptance and quality remained outside their control. And, requesting employees experienced less control over how to manage their work in that the use of the crowd was mandated from above. The organizational crowdfunding system was felt to enable more “democratic” ways of budgeting resources, but also demanded of people that they be accountable for their own success. Overall we see disruptions in managerial authority in which frontline workers are gaining greater discretion in selecting particular work requests to perform or projects to fund.

WORKPLACE REIMAGININGS

Experiences of work go to the fundamental bedrock of ourselves as people, as collectives, as culturally constituted beings. These explorations of people’s experiences in using open and crowd work systems inside of organizations illuminate ways work is being transformed, and in turn transforming how people perceive themselves at work and as workers vis-à-vis their colleagues and the work itself. Open and crowd work systems also affect the basis for and experience of relating to others at work and the workplace as a social environment. And they create fissures in assumptions about who has the authority to initiate, manage and control the work. In turn this leads us to question the centrality of “the organization” as the primary site of and means for driving the core economic activities of the industrial and post-industrial eras, including innovation, development and the movement of goods, services and expertise.

This look at the gentle winds of change emerging inside of organizations may be suggestive of a larger storm approaching as more and more work may be performed by ’strangers’, both across an organization and beyond. While not an entirely new phenomenon – subcontracting and outsourcing have been with us a long time – this further dis-intermediating of work from centralized organizational apparati, may suggest greater change on the horizon. The threat of technological unemployment, the rise and greater visibility of the independent workforce, and ethos spreading (and facing resistance) of collaborative and peer-based models may lessen the managerialism of bureaucratic models, on the one hand, while reducing the value and effect of work-based social ties on the other.

By shining a light on these dynamics, we aim to ensure that the scope of ethnographic understanding in industry is expanded to include these important shifts in work and workplace culture. Ethnographic practitioners are themselves enmeshed in workplace relations, which are subject to the same dynamics and changing mechanisms of work. And as participants in business, our job as social analysts and practitioners to look closer and understand deeper so as to create the kind of knowledge that leads to better business strategies and a better society.

Melissa Cefkin is an anthropologist at IBM Research who focuses on work and organization in complex contexts. She worked previously at the intersection of social science research, design and consulting at Sapient Corporation and at the Institute for Research on Learning. Melissa served on the Board and as co-organizer for the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference. She published Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter (2009), and numerous articles, including most recently “Work Practice Studies as Anthropology” in the Handbook of Anthropology in Business (2014). mcefkin@us.ibm.com

Obinna Anya is a postdoctoral researcher at IBM Research – Almaden. His work blends methods of social science and computer science in the design of human-centred systems and environments for network-enabled organizations of the future. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Liverpool. obanya@us.ibm.com

Bob Moore is a sociologist at IBM Research – Almaden, where he examines work practice, social interaction and human-computer interaction. Previously he worked at Xerox PARC and Yahoo! and has studied search-engine interaction using eye-tracking, avatar-mediated interaction, face-to-face interaction in print shops and telephone-mediated interaction in survey call centers. rjmoore@us.ibm.com

NOTES

Acknowledgments – We wish to thank the all participants of these efforts who shared generously of their time and patience in providing us insight to their experiences. We also thank the reviewers who encouraged a great number of interesting angles for development; we regret only that we couldn’t have addressed more of them in the scope of this paper.

1. In this section we particularly examine the work producers. Below the experience of requesters is also included.

2. In this section we focus on experiences of the external work producers. Experiences of work requesters will be addressed below. We do not currently have sufficient data on the internal employees engaged with the crowd work system of work producers.