The Global Opportunity in Online Outsourcing

By Siou Chew Kuek, Cecilia Paradi-Guilford, Toks Fayomi, Saori Imaizumi, Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis. 2015

243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Online outsourcing (OO) has become a promising alternative to traditional employment in today’s digital era. It has transformed where, when, and how work is performed. For workers, this form of outsourcing has created new opportunities to access and compete in global job markets, from anywhere at any time, as long as they have computer and Internet access. This study focuses on OO’s potential as a new and innovative channel for socioeconomic development for developing country governments and development practitioners, particularly in terms of youth employment, services exports, and participation in the digital economy. OO firms report that the private sector is currently driving most of the demand, but public sector demand for OO is a potential source of future growth. In order to understand the opportunity for developing countries, this study estimated the current size of the market and projected its growth, and profiled OO work through a combination of desk research and structured interviews with academics, online workers, firms, and industry analysts to better understand OO’s potential impact on human capital and employment. The study also conducted focus group interviews with online workers in Kenya to gather additional insight into the socioeconomic impacts of OO, and carried out case studies in Kenya and Nigeria.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee45f094fba7737625f30ea8c787b3b29476cfe1

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In Management Information Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Digital labour platforms and the future of work (2018, background): “Many governments and policy-makers in developing countries have embraced crowdwork as a potential source of good jobs (Graham, Hjorth and Lehdonvirta, 2017; Kuek et al., 2015; Schriner and Oerther, 2014) and have started to invest in digital infrastructure and programmes to train workers to perform ”
Introduction - Platforms and Infrastructures in the Digital Age (2018, background): “The online labor industry, dominated by three major platforms—Upwork, Freelancer, and Zhubajie/ Witmart—was estimated to account for $1.9 billion in gross service revenue in 2013, with 48 million registered workers (Kuek et al. 2015).”
Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods (2017, background): “Chew Kuek et al. (2015) estimate that the market for digital work was US$4.4bn in 2016, and that it is growing rapidly.”
Quantifying the Invisible Labor in Crowd Work (2021, background): “To start to quantify the invisible labor in crowd work, we develop a web plugin1 that allows us to detect when a worker is performing invisible labor and quantitatively measure the amount of time the worker spends on such efforts on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), one of the most popular crowdsourci”
Online labour index: Measuring the online gig economy for policy and research (2018, background): “Our sample is also very likely to represent the majority of the market in terms of gross transaction value (see Kuek et al. 2015, fig.”
Crowdsourcing research: Data collection with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (2018, background): “Several years later, Kuek et al. (2015) stated that globally there were about half a million registered workers on MTurk, but not all of them were active (defined as completing HITs within the past six months).”
A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers' Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk (2017, background): “r Keywords Crowdsourcing; Amazon Mechanical Turk; Hourly wage ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION Crowd work is growing [29,44]. A report by Harris and Krueger states that 600k workers participate in the online gig econo”
Decent Work and the Digital Gig Economy: A Developing Country Perspective on Employment Impacts and Standards in Online Outsourcing, Crowdwork, Etc (2017, unknown): “For developing country governments, Kuek et al (2015) recommend the following: Ensure there is a digital gig economy strategy, including taxation policy.”
Flexibility in the Gig Economy: Managing Time on Three Online Piecework Platforms (2018, unknown): “Discussions of flexibility in online gig work have focused on the absence of formal constraints (Malone 2004, Kuek et al. 2015, Sundararajan 2016).”
Between a rock and a hard place: Freedom, flexibility, precarity and vulnerability in the gig economy in Africa (2020, unknown): “Such imageries are reinforced by organizations such as the World Bank, which classifies people working on online platforms as ‘entrepreneurs’ (Kuek et al., 2015).”
Characterizing the Global Crowd Workforce: A Cross-Country Comparison of Crowdworker Demographics (2018, background): “The World Bank.”
Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers (2019, background): “…individuals come together to get a variety of work done via digital platforms as intermediaries.1 In addition to the rewards reaped by gig workers (Kuek et al., 2015; D’Cruz and Noronha, 2016), they also face significant risks, such as precarious working conditions and discrimination (De Stefano,…”