Building collective institutional infrastructures for decent platform work: The development of a crowdwork agreement in Germany

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksChapterpeer-review

Authors

Working conditions on many digital work platforms often contribute to the grand challenge of establishing decent work. While research has examined the public regulation of platform work and worker resistance, little is known about private regulatory models. In this paper, we document the development of the “Crowdwork Agreement” forged between platforms and a trade union in the relatively young German crowdworking field. We find that existing templates played an important role in the process of negotiating this new institutional infrastructure, despite the radically new work context. While the platforms drew on the corporate social responsibility template of voluntary self-regulation via a code of conduct focusing on procedural aspects of decent platform work (i.e., improving work conditions and processes), the union contributed a traditional social partnership template emphasizing accountability, parity and distributive matters. The trade union’s approach prevailed in terms of accountability and parity mechanisms, while the platforms were able to uphold the mostly procedural character of their template. This compromise is reflected in many formal and informal interactions, themselves characteristic of a social partnership approach. Our study contributes to research on institutional infrastructures in emerging fields and their role in addressing grand challenges.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationOrganizing for societal grand challenges
EditorsAli Aslan Gümüsay, Emilio Marti, Hanna Trittin-Ulbrich, Christopher Wickert
Number of pages26
Place of PublicationBingley
PublisherEmerald Publishing Limited
Publication date29.03.2022
Pages43-68
ISBN (print)978-1-83909-829-1
ISBN (electronic)978-1-83909-826-0, 978-1-83909-828-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 29.03.2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Thomas Gegenhuber, Elke Schuessler, Georg Reischauer and Laura Thäter. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Research areas

  • Decent work, Digital platforms, Governance, Grand challenge, Institutional infrastructure, Regulation

Documents

DOI

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Luhmann-Handbuch
  2. How selfish are self-expression values?
  3. ADORE-Project Teaching Adolescent Struggling Readers
  4. Exploring intrinsic, instrumental and relational values for sustainable management of social-ecological systems
  5. Moderators of the ego depletion effect
  6. The Managerial Relevance of Marketing Science: Properties and Genesis
  7. Mechanisms of teleological change
  8. Managing Knowledge in Organization Studies Through Instrumentation
  9. Toward a better understanding of the mindsets of negotiators
  10. ETL ensembles for chunking, NER and SRL
  11. Polarization of Time and Income
  12. Advancing Decision-Visualization Environments—Empirically informed Design Recommendations
  13. Challenges in political interviews
  14. Evaluation of Magnesium Die-Casting Alloys for Elevated Temperature Applications
  15. Form and Relation
  16. Adjusting the Sails
  17. Investigation of minimum creep rates and stress exponents calculated from tensile and compressive creep data of magnesium alloy AE42
  18. Tree phylogenetic diversity structures multitrophic communities
  19. Water quantity and quality in the Zerafshan river basin - only an upstream riparian problem?
  20. The Meaning of Higher-Order Factors in Reflective-Measurement Models
  21. Effectiveness of a web-based intervention for injured claimants
  22. Value co-creation through collective intelligence in the public sector
  23. Gesichtssprache
  24. The Sociolinguistics of language use in Ireland
  25. What can be learnt from the brazilian cerrado?
  26. Integration of risk-oriented environmental management information systems and resource planning systems
  27. "Wen feiern wir denn eigentlich?"
  28. Correction to
  29. Lehrer-Kooperation im JeKi-Kontext
  30. Velocity-free friction compensation for motion systems with actuator constraint
  31. Nutrients addition regulates temperature sensitivity of maize straw mineralization