Harnessing Novel Forms of Work Organization: Design Knowledge on Crowdworking Platform Systems

Book excerpt: The digitalization is currently fundamentally changing our world of work. One important trend in this context is the “platform economy”, with crowdworking platforms as an increasingly relevant platform type. Many of these crowdworking platforms and their surrounding work systems including participants, nformation, technologies, as well as processes and activities, are comparatively new and often designed incrementally. What is currently still lacking is systematic knowledge about the efficient design of such crowdworking platform systems (CWPS). This dissertation provides such design knowledge in the form of a nascent design theory. One important focus lies on the question how such CWPS should be designed to also use this novel form of work organization for more complex work. This dissertation furthermore shows how a close interlinking of external crowds and internal employees of an organization helps to harness the advantages of crowdworking while at the same time mitigates its disadvantages.