Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Capitalizing Relationships: Modes of Participation in Crowdsourcing

  • Published:
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

While crowds online are increasingly used for data gathering and problem solving, the relationships and structures within these processes remain largely unexamined. For understanding the usage of crowdsourcing and to design appropriate technologies and processes, it is important to understand how different tools support relationships in these contexts. Based on an extensive literature review of existing crowdsourcing tools and practices, we contribute with the development of a typology of alienation in crowdsourcing by using Marx’s theory of alienation. The theory serves as a lens to compare and contrast a number of currently available tools for crowdsourcing, focusing on how relationships between participants are supported and capitalized within the tool. We show how different types of crowdsourcing practices can be described in terms of alienation where the producer, the producers, the consumers, and products are connected in different modes of participation. This systematical application of Marx theory of alienation provides a way to compare the technical support for social relationships in a number of platforms used for crowdsourcing.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Figure 1.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Aitamurto, Tanja; and Helene E. Landemore (2015). Five Design Principles for Crowdsourced Policymaking: Assessing the Case of Crowdsourced Off-Road Traffic Law in Finland. Journal of Social Media for Organizations, vol. 2, no. 1, February 2015, pp. 1–19.

  • Antikainen, Maria; Marko Mäkipää; and Mikko Ahonen (2010). Motivating and supporting collaboration in open innovation. European Journal of Innovation Management, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 100–119.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bederson, Benjamin B; and Alexander J. Quinn (2011). Web Workers Unite! Addressing Challenges of Online Laborers. In CHI EA 2011. Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, Canada, 7 – 12 May 2011. New York: ACM Press, pp. 97–106.

  • Ben Eli, Ariane; and Jeremy Hutchins (2010). Intelligence after Intellipedia: Improving the push pull balance with a social networking utility. DTIC-E-TR-2010/05. Information Science and Technology Directorate Research Report. Fort Belvoir, Virginia: Defense Technical Information Center.

  • Benkler, Yochai (2002). Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. Yale Law Journal, vol. 112, no. 3, 2002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berardi, Franco (2009). The soul at work: From alienation to autonomy. Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e).

  • Beverungen, A.; S. Bohm; and C. Land (2015). Free Labour, Social Media, Management: Challenging Marxist Organization Studies. Organization Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 473–489.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blohm, Ivo; Ulrich Bretschneider; Jan Marco Leimeister; and Helmut Krcmar (2011). Does collaboration among participants lead to better ideas in IT-based idea competitions? An empirical investigation. International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 106.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boltanski, Luc.; and Eve Chiapello (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso.

  • Brabham, C. Daren (2013). Crowdsourcing. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Braverman, Harry (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Busarovs, Aleksejs (2013). Ethical Aspects of Crowdsourcing , or is it a Modern Form of Exploitation. International Journal of Economics & Business Administration, vol. I, no. 1, pp. 3–14.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carpenter, Jennifer (2011). May the Best Analyst Win. Science, vol. 331, no. 6018, 2011, pp. 698–699.

  • Causer, Tim; and Valerie Wallace (2012). Building a volunteer community: results and findings from Transcribe Bentham. Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooper, Seth (2014). A framework for scientific discovery through video games. Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

  • Cooper, Seth; Firas Khatib; Ilya Makedon; Hao Lu; Janos Barbero; David Baker; et al (2011). Analysis of social gameplay macros in the Foldit cookbook. In FDG 2011. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games, Bordeaux, France, 28 June – 1 July 2011. New York: ACM Press, pp. 9–14

  • Croeser, Sky; and Tim Highfield (2014). Occupy Oakland and #oo: Uses of Twitter within the Occupy movement. First Monday, vol. 19, no. 3, March 2014, pp. 1–16.

  • Dean, Jodi (2005). Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics. Cultural Politics, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 51–74.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Estelles-Arolas, E.; and F. Gonzalez-Ladron-de-Guevara (2012). Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information Science, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 189–200.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Feller, Joseph; Patrick Finnegan; Jeremy Hayes; and Philip O’Reilly (2009). Institutionalising information asymmetry: governance structures for open innovation. Information Technology & People, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 297–316.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Felstinerf, Alek (2011). Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry. Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 143–204.

  • Fort, Karën; Gilles Adda; and K. Bretonnel Cohen (2011). Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine? Computational Linguistics, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 413–420.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fuchs, Christian (2014). Social Media and the Public Sphere. TripleC (Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 57–101.

  • Fyfe, Toby; and Paul Crookall (2010). Social media and public sector policy dilemmas. Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geiger, David; Stefan Seedorf; Thimo Schulze; Robert C Nickerson; Martin Schader; and Robert Nickerson (2011). Managing the Crowd: Towards a Taxonomy of Crowdsourcing Processes Managing the Crowd: Towards a Taxonomy of Crowdsourcing Processes. In AMCIS 2011. Proceedings – All Submissions. AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=amcis2011_submissions

  • Gruzd, Anatoliy; and Jeffrey Roy (2014). Investigating Political Polarization on Twitter: A Canadian Perspective. Policy & Internet, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 28–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hansson, Karin; and Love Ekenberg (2016). Managing deliberation: tools for structuring discussions and analyzing representation. Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, vol. 10, no. 2, 2016.

  • Hansson, Karin; Kheira Belkacem; and Love Ekenberg (2015). Open government and democracy: A research review. Social Science Computer Review, vol. 33, no. 5, October 2015, pp. 540–555.

  • Hardt, Michael; and Antonio Negri (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  • Hardt, Michael; and Antonio Negri (2005). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. London: Penguin Books.

  • Horton, John Joseph; and Lydia B. Chilton (2010). The labor economics of paid crowdsourcing. In EC 2010. Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Electronic commerce, Cambridge, Mass., 7 – 11 June 2010. New York: ACM Press, pp. 209–218.

  • Howe, Jeff (2006). The Rise of Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe | Byliner. Wired Magazine. https://www.byliner.com/jeff-howe/stories/the-rise-of-crowdsourcing

  • Hughes, Amanda Lee (2014). Participatory design for the social media needs of emergency public information officers. In S. R. Hiltz, M. S. Pfaff, L. Plotnick, and P. C. Shih (eds): ISCRAM 2014. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference for Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Pennsylvania, USA, 18 May 18 – 21 May 2014. The Pennsylvania State University, pp. 727–736.

  • Irani, Lilly C.; and M. Six Silberman (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. In CHI 2013. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Paris, France, 27 April – 2 May 2013. New York: ACM Press, pp. 611–620.

  • Jackson, Paul; and Jane Klobas (2013). Deciding to use an enterprise wiki: the role of social institutions and scripts. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 323–333.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kamar, Ece; Severin Hacker; and Eric Horvitz (2012). Combining human and machine intelligence in large-scale crowdsourcing. In AAMAS 2012. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Valencia, Spain, 4 – 8 June 2012. New York: ACM Press, pp. 467–474.

  • Kanstrup, Anne Marie; and Ellen Christiansen (2006). Selecting and evoking innovators: combining democracy and creativity. In NordiCHI 2006. Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction changing roles, Oslo, Norway, 14 – 18 October 2006. New York: ACM Press, pp. 321–330.

  • Kasymova, Jyldyz T. (2013). Reforming local government in developing countries: Implementation of a participatory budgeting process in Kyrgyzstan. The State University of New Jersey.

  • Kittur, Aniket; Jeffrey V. Nickerson; Michael S Bernstein; Elizabeth M. Gerber; Aaron Shaw; John Zimmerman; et al. (2013). The future of crowd work. In CSCW 2013. Proceedings of the conference on computer supported cooperative work, San Antonio, Texas, 23 – 27 February 2013. New York: ACM Press, pp. Pages 1301–1318.

  • Kleemann, Frank; G. Günter Voß; and Kerstin Rieder (2008). Un(der)paid Innovators: The Commercial Utilization of Consumer Work through Crowdsourcing. Science, Technology & Innovation Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 5–26.

  • Kozinets, Robert V.; Andrea Hemetsberger; and Hope Jens Schau (2008). The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds: Collective Innovation in the Age of Networked Marketing. Journal of Macromarketing, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 339–354.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, Carman KM; Ching Yuen Chan; Sophie Ho; K. L. Choy; and W. H. Ip. (2015). Explore the feasibility of adopting crowdsourcing for innovative problem solving. Industrial Management & Data Systems, vol. 115, no. 5, pp. 803–832.

  • Ludwig, Thomas; Christian Reuter; Tim Siebigteroth; and Volkmar Pipek (2015). CrowdMonitor: Mobile Crowd Sensing for Assessing Physical and Digital Activities of Citizens during Emergencies. In CHI 2015. Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Seoul, Korea, 18-23 April 2015. New York: ACM Press, pp. 4083–4092.

  • Ludwig, Thomas; Julian Dax; Volkmar Pipek; and Dave Randall (2016). Work or leisure? Designing a user-centered approach for researching activity “in the wild”. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 487–515.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Majchrzak, Ann; Christian Wagnerr; and Dave Yates (2013). The Impact of Shaping on Knowledge Reuse for Organizational Improvement with Wikis. MIS Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 455–469.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martin, David; Benjamin V. Hanrahan; Jacki O’Neill; and Neha Gupta (2014). Being a turker. CSCW 2014. Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, Baltimore, Maryland, 15–19 February 2014. New York: ACM Press, pp. 224–235.

  • Martin, David; Jacki O’Neill; Neha Gupta; and Benjamin V. Hanrahan (2016). Turking in a Global Labour Market. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 25, no. 1, February 2016, pp. 39–77.

  • Marx, Karl (1844a). Comments on James Mill. From Collected Works. First published in full in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 1, Band 3, Berlin, 1932; English Translation by Clemens Dutt for the Collected Works. Retrieved 24 December 2012, from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/

  • Marx, Karl (1844b). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. First Published: Progress Publishers, Moscow 1959. Translated by Martin Milligan from the German text, revised by Dirk J. Struik, contained in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 1, Band. 3. Corrections were made of typographical errors and the author’s obvious slips when preparing the Russian edition, 1956. Transcribed in 2000 for marxists.org by Andy Blunden. Proofed and corrected by Matthew Carmody, 2009. Retrieved 24 December 2017, from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pd

  • Marx, Karl (1875). Critique of the Gotha Programme. From Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume Three, p. 13–30. First Published in Abridged in the journal Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 1, No. 18, 1890-91. Online Version 1999 transcribed by Zodiac and Brian Baggins. Retrieved 26 December 2017, from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/

  • McKay, J. (2014). How Sandy changed social media strategies in New York City. Emergency Management, 2014. http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Sandy-Social-Media-Strategies-New-York-City.html. Accessed 26 December 2017.

  • Mergel, Ines A. (2012). Distributed Democracy: SeeClickFix.Com for Crowdsourced Issue Reporting. SSRN Electronic Journal, January 2012.

  • Mergel, Ines; and Kevin C. Desouza (2013). Implementing Open Innovation in the Public Sector: The Case of Challenge.gov. Public Administration Review, vol. 73, no. 6, pp. 882–890.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mladenow, Andreas; Christine Bauer; Christine Strauss; and Michal Gregus (2015). Collaboration and Locality in Crowdsourcing. In 2015 International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems. IEEE, pp. 1–6.

  • Morgan, John; and Richard Wang (2010). Tournaments for Ideas. California Management Review, vol. 52, no. 2, 2010.

  • Moser, Christine; and Anouk Van Eijkeren (2016). User-generated content? Get serious! Understanding the interactions between organisations and customers on social media. International Journal of Business Environment, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 284.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Piller, Frank T.; and Dominik Walcher (2006). Toolkits for idea competitions: a novel method to integrate users in new product development. R and D Management, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 307–318.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Preis, Tobias; Helen Susannah Moat; Steven R Bishop; Philip Treleaven; and H Eugene Stanley (2013). Quantifying the digital traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr. Scientific reports, vol. 3, pp. 3141.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Prpic, John; and Prashant Shukla (2014). The Contours of Crowd Capability. In HICSS 2014. Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, Hawaii, USA, 6 – 9 January 2014. Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society, pp. 3461–3470.

  • Prpić, John; Araz Taeihagh; and James Melton (2015). The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing. Policy & Internet, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 340–361.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Retelny, Daniela; Sébastien Robaszkiewicz; Alexandra To; Walter S. Lasecki; Jay Patel; Negar Rahmati; et al. (2014). Expert crowdsourcing with flash teams. In UIST 2014. Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, Honolulu, Hawaii, 5-8 October 2014. New York: ACM Press, pp. 75–85.

  • Rinehart, James W.; and Seymour Faber (1986). The tyranny of work: Alienation and the labour process. Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

  • Salehi, Niloufar; Lilly C. Irani; Michael S. Bernstein; Ali Alkhatib; Eva Ogbe; and Kristy Milland (2015). We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers. In CHI 2015.  Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seoul, Korea, 18–23 April 2015. New York: ACM Press, pp. 1621–1630.

  • Schelhorn, Svend Jonas; Benjamin Herfort; Richard Leiner; Alexander Zipf; and João Porto De Albuquerque (2014). Identifying elements at risk from OpenStreetMap: The case of flooding. In ISCRAM 2014. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference for Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Pennsylvania, USA, 18 – 21 May 2014. The Pennsylvania State University, pp. 508–512.

  • Scholz, Trebor (2010). Facebook as playground and factory. In D. E. Wittkower (ed.), Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind? Chicago: Open Court, pp. 241–252.

  • Scholz, Trebor, ed. (2013). Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory. New York: Routledge.

  • Silberman, M. Six; Joel Ross; Lilly Irani; and Bill Tomlinson (2010). Sellers’ problems in human computation markets. In HCOMP 2010. Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human Computation, Washington DC, 25 July 2010. New York: ACM Press, pp. 18–21.

  • Soden, Robert; Nama Budhathoki; and Leysia Palen (2014). Resilience-building and the crisis informatics agenda: Lessons learned from open cities Kathmandu. In ISCRAM 2014. Proceedings of the 11th International ISCRAM Conference, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA, May 2014, pp. 339–348.

  • Stacey, Paul (2008). “Wikivism”: From Communicative Capitalism to Organized Networks. Cultural Politics: an International Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 73–99.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Virno, Paolo (2004). A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. MIT Press.

  • Wagner, Erika B. (2011). Why Prize? The Surprising Resurgence of Prizes to Stimulate Innovation. Research-Technology Management, vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 32–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wiggins, Andrea; and Kevin Crowston (2012). Goals and Tasks: Two Typologies of Citizen Science Projects. In HICSS 2012. Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Grand Wailea, Maui, Hawaii, 4 – 7 January 2012. Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society, pp. 3426–3435. 

  • Wooten, Joel; and Karl T. Ulrich (2015). Idea Generation and the Role of Feedback: Evidence from Field Experiments with Innovation Tournaments. Production and Operations Management, no. Nov, 2015.

  • Yuill, Chris (2005). Marx: Capitalism, Alienation and Health. Social Theory and Health, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 126–143.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV), Stockholm University, Nodhuset, Borgarfjordsgatan 12, Stockholm, Sweden

    Karin Hansson

  2. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

    Thomas Ludwig

  3. Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Tanja Aitamurto

Authors
  1. Karin Hansson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Thomas Ludwig
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Tanja Aitamurto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Karin Hansson.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Hansson, K., Ludwig, T. & Aitamurto, T. Capitalizing Relationships: Modes of Participation in Crowdsourcing. Comput Supported Coop Work 28, 977–1000 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-018-9341-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-018-9341-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation