Tackling the impersonality of algorithmic management: community-building strategies and social well-being on online labor platforms

Online labor platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or UpWork have created new income opportunities for independent workers across the globe. Workers connect to clients for short-term tasks of varying complexity, like labelling images or designing animations. These workers operate remotely, with limited opportunities to socialize with each other. Moreover, algorithms monitor their performance through impersonal and often invisible data surveillance. Online labor platforms are hence accused of eliciting social isolation and violating article 15 of the EU’s Platform Work Directive, which guarantees platform workers’ right to social communication.

Some online labor platforms and independent workers have started to address this issue through “community-building strategies” to increase the sense of social belonging and well-being among workers (e.g., creating in-platform chat functions or social media forums). Building on theories of social well-being and research on platform organizations, this project investigates an array of community-building strategies developed by online labor platforms and workers, and their effects on workers’ social well-being (e.g., sense of cohesion, interpersonal acceptance, and social contribution).

Project objectives

The project has two objectives:

• Firstly, the project aims to generate a better understanding of community-building strategies on online labor platforms, by studying reflections from the perspective of Political Philosophy of Technology and empirical studies from the fields of Organization Studies and Work and Organizational Psychology. The plan is to develop an initial overview of online labor platforms’ community-building strategies. To further supplement this, open-ended survey data will be collected by asking online labor platform workers to report on different community-building strategies of both the platforms and themselves. Taken together, this will result in the development of a taxonomy of community-building strategies in online labor platforms.
• In the second stage of the project, survey data will be collected on the relationship between community-building strategies and workers’ social well-being. Based on the findings from Objective 1, a survey will be devised and online labor platform workers will be recruited to fill it in to test the relationship between different community building strategies and online labor platform workers’ social well-being with a time-lagged study design, including measurements at two different point in time. This will allow to appraise the effectiveness of different community-building strategies for generating social well-being. 

Potential impact

The project will provide insights into how to enhance workers’ social well-being on online labor platforms. Labor platforms have a notorious reputation for high worker turnover. Especially among low-skilled online labor platform workers, problems with social isolation and mental hardship are rampant. The project will provide tools to enhance community-building and workers’ social well-being. These will be useful for both online labor platform companies themselves and worker organizations. 

Duration

The project will run for two years starting from September 2023 onwards.

Multidisciplinary project team

• Lead applicant Dr. Tim Christiaens is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and has worked extensively on platform technology and the digitalization of work. He wrote a book on Digital Working Lives, published in 2022 with Rowman & Littlefield and is the technology columnist for the Belgian journal SamPol. His knowledge will be vital for the development of the overall theoretical framework of the study.
• Dr. Francesca Ciulli is Associate Professor at the Department of Organization Studies and obtained an interdisciplinary HSRI grant on the effect of online labor platforms’ governance models on the well-being of workers in the Global South and is currently co-supervising a PhD student on this project. She has also published multiple papers on the strategies of digital platform organizations and their implications for social value creation. Her knowledge in this field and her expertise in qualitative, inductive research methods will be critical for the development of a taxonomy of community-building strategies. 
• Dr. Ivana Vranjes is currently co-supervising the project on the effect of OLPs’ governance models on the well-being of employees in the Global South with Francesca Ciulli. She is experienced in quantitative research methods and has published extensively on the topics of employee interpersonal relationships and well-being in relation to their (technological) working conditions. Her expertise will be particularly vital for the implementation of theories of social well-being in the context of work, for designing empirical studies and analyzing quantitative data.  

External partners involved in the project are Nederlandse Stichting voor Psychotechniek (NSvP), European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) and Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek (TNO). All three partners are interested in labor market tendencies and their impact on workers. In collaboration with these three partners, a workshop will be developed, aiming to create an interdisciplinary environment for researchers and practitioners from different backgrounds to connect and exchange ideas, building on the insights developed with this research.

Prof. dr. Mijke Houwerzijl, Full Professor of Labor Law at Tilburg Law School, will advise the team on a policy-brief with partner in the project ETUI. This policy brief will focus on the legal issue of the art. 15 of the EU’s Platform Work Directive and will outline how the research findings substantiate the “right to social communication” for online labor platform workers. 

This project is funded by Tilburg University’s Digital Sciences for Society program: