TY - JOUR

T1 - Crowdsourcing

T2 - Global search and the twisted roles of consumers and producers

AU - Bauer, Robert M.

AU - Gegenhuber, Thomas

N1 - Funding Information: Thomas Gegenhuber thanks the Austrian Academy of Sciences for funding his work. Publisher Copyright: © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.

PY - 2015/9/27

Y1 - 2015/9/27

N2 - Crowdsourcing spreads and morphs quickly, shaping areas as diverse as creating, organizing, and sharing knowledge; producing digital artifacts; providing services involving tangible assets; or monitoring and evaluating. Crowdsourcing as sourcing by means of ‘global search’; yields four types of values for sourcing actors: creative expertise, critical items, execution capacity, and bargaining power. It accesses cheap excess capacities at the work realm’;s margins, channeling them toward production. Provision and utilization of excess capacities rationalize society while intimately connecting to a broader societal trend twisting consumers’; and producers’; roles: leading toward ‘working consumers’; and ‘consuming producers’; and shifting power toward the latter. Similarly, marketers using crowdsourcing’;s look and feel to camouflage traditional approaches to bringing consumers under control preserve producer power.

AB - Crowdsourcing spreads and morphs quickly, shaping areas as diverse as creating, organizing, and sharing knowledge; producing digital artifacts; providing services involving tangible assets; or monitoring and evaluating. Crowdsourcing as sourcing by means of ‘global search’; yields four types of values for sourcing actors: creative expertise, critical items, execution capacity, and bargaining power. It accesses cheap excess capacities at the work realm’;s margins, channeling them toward production. Provision and utilization of excess capacities rationalize society while intimately connecting to a broader societal trend twisting consumers’; and producers’; roles: leading toward ‘working consumers’; and ‘consuming producers’; and shifting power toward the latter. Similarly, marketers using crowdsourcing’;s look and feel to camouflage traditional approaches to bringing consumers under control preserve producer power.

KW - Brand communities

KW - control

KW - crowdsourcing

KW - digital labor

KW - global search

KW - marketing

KW - open innovation

KW - prosumer

KW - sharing economy

KW - working consumers

KW - Management studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84940054278&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/1350508415585030

DO - 10.1177/1350508415585030

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 27524930

AN - SCOPUS:84940054278

VL - 22

SP - 661

EP - 681

JO - Organization

JF - Organization

SN - 1350-5084

IS - 5

ER -