3.1 Introduction

A bestseller published by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) titled The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies is one instance in a long list of recent publications exploring the effect of new information and communication technologies on labor markets. New technologies such as artificial intelligence employing self-learning algorithms and large bodies of data will alter future collaboration between humans and machines. Observers posit that such digital technologies will enable the automation of industrial as well as cognitive tasks previously reserved for human ingenuity, triggering an era of accelerated innovation and significant disruption comparable to the fourth industrial revolution (Frey and Osborne, 2013).

While new information and communication technologies may facilitate the substitution of human labor, they also allow for the emergence of new forms of work. A closer look at the emerging on-demand service economy, for instance, reveals a growing workforce characterized by commodification, low costs, minimal institutionalization, and increasing anonymity. Digital platforms and ecosystems such as Upwork or Topcoder, and even sharing platforms like Airbnb and Uber, bring disruptive change to existing industries by enlisting the work of thousands of dispersed individual workers (Kneese and Rosenblat, 2014). The traditional model of labor is hence under attack from two directions simultaneously, through replacement by new technologies, and through commodification facilitated through new, technology-enabled forms of organizing. We will call the new work model that will emerge in its place “digital work.”

As technological innovations disrupt traditional forms of employment, and new forms of labor emerge, we have yet to develop a thorough understanding of how the nature and meaning of digital work will evolve in the future. Some researchers, taking an optimistic view, have pointed to the potential benefits of online micro-entrepreneurship, such as flexibility, enjoyment, and the economic empowerment of previously constrained individuals (Fish and Srinivasan, 2012; Gansky, 2010; Horten, 2011; Kelliher and Anderson, 2009; Kneese and Rosenblat, 2014; Ruggieri, Mosconi, Poponi, and Silvestri, 2015).

Conversely, digital work is, at least to date, often considered to be remote, modular, and conducted on a project-by-project basis, limiting the creation of permanent ties to employers, organizations, or co-workers (Andrejevic, 2009; Ashford et al., 2007; Connelly and Gallagher, 2004; de Peuter, 2011; Fuchs and Sevignani, 2013; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Gregg, 2011; Hollister, 2011; Horowitz and Rosati, 2014; McKercher and Mosco, 2008; Rainie and Wellman, 2012; Smith, 2016). Digital workers laboring on decontextualized projects in comparatively social isolation are still often merely viewed as outsourced “human computers.” Nevertheless, the nature and meaning of one’s work accounts for a critical part of the identity of many people (Blustein, 2011). In other words, they retain the natural human desire to feel needed, to feel valued, and to have their work appreciated by the community and larger society (Jung, 2015). In short, they want to feel that they “matter.”

3.2 The Origins and Challenges of the Digital Transformation from an Industrial Relations Perspective

In the past decade, much attention has been paid to the ongoing development of the fourth industrial revolution, which is set to change work, work practices, and workplaces (Colbert, Yee, and George, 2016). In regard to the transformation of work, this revolution is sought either to fundamentally alter or outright replace existing work, such as many clerical professions, or to be conducive to large-scale projects that were formerly the sole purview of more traditional forms of organizations, which are to be broken down into small work packages that can be distributed among a digitized workforce (Lehdonvirta and Ernkvist, 2011; Kittur et al., 2013). Currently, this involves more menial tasks such as usability testing, image tagging, audio transcription and/or evaluation, and text fragment categorization, but also encompasses the gig economy that provides, for instance, transportation and hospitality services. However, with improving technology and organizational design, it will also increasingly include creative and innovative tasks. Progressively greater numbers of individuals are either making a living or earning additional income through freelance contracting on the Internet. Examples of this include the completion of human-intelligence tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) and Clickworker, and the offering of software development or design skills via crowdsourcing platforms such as Upwork or 99designs.

The overall size of the digital gig economy was estimated at US$2 billion in 2013 and grew to US$4.8 billion in 2016 (Kuek et al., 2015). The emergence of the sector has been driven by the platforms’ combination of competitive logic and technical innovation, which they have used not only to win market share from existing IT outsourcing, but also to generate new forms of outsourcing (Huws, 2017). Growth has been further driven on the supply side by the competitive logic of clients seeking and obtaining three key benefits: lower costs (financial and time), greater flexibility, and access to a wider skills pool (i.e. higher quality workers) (Bergvall-Kareborn and Howcroft, 2014).

Many in traditional employment may also witness changes in the nature and meaning of their work as a result of the recent development of digital technologies. For instance, with digital technologies foreseeably automating many incumbent forms of employment, some may face a transition of their formal work roles (e.g., as they are replaced by or have to manage robots and artificial intelligence for manufacturing) (Wolf, 2016). Indeed, the number of jobs that largely rely on routine tasks is predicted to decrease (Hilton, 2008). New employment is predominately arising at the fringes of the traditional labor market, such as in the aforementioned gig and freelance economy. As computers are still not good at abstract tasks, which often require higher skills, and manual tasks with lower skills requirement, skills and competencies required in the future are said to be increasingly polarized (Hilton, 2008). Moreover, the meaning of work is also changing for many. For example, nursing has traditionally been seen as a hand-holding profession. However, since nurses’ work is being increasingly digitized, their work identity has been suggested to be moving away from the humanized aspect toward technical skills (Kolbæk, 2015).

In recent years, a rich body of literature has emerged that tries to shed light on the nature of this digital transformation. The literature itself is divided into several scientific disciplines, discourses, and theoretical approaches. Exemplary disciplines involved in the study of such new forms of work and work practices include sociology/anthropology (Fish and Srinivasan, 2012; Pinch and Bijker, 2012), communication and media studies (Irani, 2015; Paul M Leonardi, 2015; Martin, Parry, and Flowers, 2015; Sarker, Ajuja, Sarker, and Kirkeby, 2011), psychology (Brown, Venkatesh, Kuruzovich, and Massey, 2008; Hoch and Kozlowski, 2014), organization studies (Bauer and Gegenhuber, 2015; Boons, Stam, and Barkema, 2015; Kirkman, Rosen, Tesluk, and Gibson, 2004; Spreitzer, Cameron, and Garrett, 2017), and information systems and computer science, such as computer-supported cooperative work and human–computer interaction (Kittur et al., 2013; Venkatesh and Goyal, 2010).

In the following discussion of our own research, we postulate that digital technologies have transformed labor into three distinct forms, leading to three distinct types of labor, namely aspirational, platform, and corporate labor, as illustrated in Figure 3.1. At the current point in time, corporate labor is still the form of labor that, financially, allows a career to be sustained the best; aspirational labor (as will be explained in more detail below) currently pertains more to career entry activities, particularly in the creative industries; whereas platform labor takes a middle ground encompassing increasingly more fluid freelancing agreements. We expect all three forms of labor to become increasingly more collaborative, as we have already witnessed in the preceding decades— depicted in Figure 3.1 as one of the fundamental dimensions of future work. By Collaborative Creation we in essence refer to work that is to be increasingly split up into more distinct parts to be worked on either through human or artificial intelligence. As our final dimension, depicted in the figure below as Organizational Openness, we also expect a more open organizational design, in which the boundaries between organizations become increasingly blurred.

Digitization empowers all three types of labor, which are enabled through technologies. For instance, traditional corporate labor can be performed in established settings but in novel ways, with less geographical and time constraints, in order to make a workplace more inclusive. For individuals active in freelancing on platform organizations, digital technologies enable a new type of boundaryless career, where workers and employers are matched on a case-by-case basis through a digital intermediary—the platform. Finally, there is the mostly unremunerated creative, aspirational labor that, nonetheless, may be not only critical to the value creation of companies, but also a means to pursue one’s hobby and/or passion in a rewarding career.

Figure 3.1

3.3 Future Research Agenda

Clearly, understanding the conditions under which digital technologies are shaping organizational phenomena is an important current research agenda (Ashford, George, and Blatt, 2007; Colbert et al., 2016; Piezunka and Ander, 2015; Spreitzer et al., 2017). Specifically, there is an urgent need to advance our understanding of individual attitudinal and behavioral responses in digitized workplaces (Boons et al., 2015; Gibson and Gibbs, 2006; Nakatsu, Grossman, and Iacovou, 2014). Both public institutions and private organizations share responsibility in creating a fair digital economy for workers. Accordingly, by focusing on both procedural and interactional fairness, our goal is to provide evidence-based implications for policy makers and stakeholders of what factors or procedures may support positive work arrangements for digital workers. The dependence of workers on online platforms raises important questions as to organizational power dynamics. Corporate and institutional social responsibility will thus be a key component within this research question.

For instance, some of our empirical studies demonstrate that platform labor may see the instant digital feedback they receive as the result of surveillance rather than support. Considering that such instant feedback is indeed a primary social stimulus for platform laborers, as they are working through the mediation of an online platform without face-to-face or other means of interaction (Gamrat, Zimmerman, Dudek, and Peck, 2014), this has important implications not only for their performance, but also for their psychological well-being. We have also observed that platform laborers do look for meaning in their work and hope to see their work matter, not least so they can develop their careers in platform work, despite the lack of vertical career mobility and competence development. We will pay particular attention to the role of worker voice, feedback mechanisms, and the provision of development opportunities for workers. We also want to question the responsiveness of platforms to the changing needs of workers. As greater numbers of companies transition to a partly or wholly digital workforce, we question whether organizations are evolving with worker needs in mind or are even redefining what it means to be an “employee” for internal benefit. With this research question, we hope to generate cutting-edge empirical research that can help different stakeholders to identify exclusionary elements, leading to the creation of mechanisms that will foster greater inclusion and fairness.

Following this research question, we also aim to examine the role of entry into the digital economy and consider how aspiring digital workers acquire the necessary digital literacy skills to engage online. With the rise of online work, traditional jobs are increasingly being replaced by portfolio careers full of diverse activities. With our contribution, we consider how and why people choose different jobs at different points in their lives, and how the boundaries between those might intersect or conflict. We also consider digital skill divides, which may be perpetuated by offline social and economic factors. Of these, proactive skill development and adjustment in the face of new career demands has gained greater attention, particularly regarding the rapidly evolving nature of the digital economy. Skills developed in educational settings may be misaligned to the needs of the current and future workplace. Accordingly, we will challenge the role of youth engagement and preparation for the future of work, informing stakeholders in education how to provide sensible interventions that spur effective skill development both online and offline.

Furthermore, organizations have increasingly been employing distributed teams with digital solutions as means to improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness (Colbert et al., 2016). For many workers today, their jobs are not confined to a specific location or point in time. On the contrary, teams can easily be arranged across temporal, geographical, and organizational boundaries (Hoch and Kozlowski, 2014). As new ways of working, such distributed teams are assumed to benefit employees and organizations alike, with potential benefits such as increased flexibility, work–life balance, job satisfaction, and performance (Gilson, Maynard, Young, Vartiainen, and Hakonen, 2015; Liao, 2017; Martins et al., 2004). However, despite the alleged benefits, this new team format tends to obtain less desirable individual and organizational outcomes than traditional teams do (Gibson and Gibbs, 2006; Ortiz de Guinea et al., 2012). Distributed teams have been reported to display less extra-role behaviors (Ganesh and Gupta, 2010) and experience more communication issues (Daim et al., 2012; Ortiz de Guinea et al., 2012) and increased task conflict (Ortiz de Guinea et al., 2012). Other disadvantages of distributed teams as opposed to co-located teams include lower levels of satisfaction with work and one’s team, as well as less knowledge sharing (Ortiz de Guinea et al., 2012), trust, team cohesion, cooperative behavior, and social control (Hoch and Kozlowski, 2014).

Leading in such digitized workplaces can be challenging, as leaders who are not geographically present typically have a harder time withholding an active, relationship-focused leadership style, as they do not have other means to communicate with their employees aside from computer-mediated communication tools (Dulebohn and Hoch, 2017). Supporting this notion, Huang et al. (2010) found that media richness influences the relationship between transformational leadership and cooperative climate in distributed teams. One of our empirical studies demonstrates that transformational leadership is likely to be less effective in building high-quality leader–member relationships in teams that rely strongly on electronic communication tools, such as video conferencing, instant messages, phone calls, and emails, to go about their daily work. The weakened effect is particularly likely to occur with members in distributed teams who have high task interdependency among each other. This indicates that the role of leadership is likely to be substituted in distributed teams in which members have a high frequency of interactions among each other. While this is perhaps good news for organizations that aim for a flat structure, for most of the organizations that do have some levels of hierarchical structure, ineffective leadership can be detrimental. Based on this finding, we challenge current management theories based on traditional organizational settings, which may not necessarily apply to the more open and fluid organizational processing enabled by digital technologies, and suggest that more research is needed.

The final research question will act as the culmination of the project, drawing insights from the former research questions. Our overall aim is to integrate various theory and research streams to illuminate the manifold experiences of “mattering” within the digital economy. We want to give the individual workers in the digital economy a voice and listen to what is being said, inviting workers to tell their own stories. How do they feel in the digital workspace? Do workers perceive different experiences of mattering from creative work, unwaged hope labor, and unskilled piece work? What implications does the ability to contextualize one’s own work have for individual well-being and productivity? Our goal is to create guidelines, ideas, and hands-on organizational design principles that might provide greater meaning with digital work, improving worker experiences and promoting the acceptance of digital labor formats by potentially uncertain workers. Above all, we want to refocus ongoing debates on individual workers, including aspirational, platform, and corporate laborers, without whom there would be no digital economy.