The article “Microphones, not megaphones: Functional crowdworker voice regimes on digital work platforms” coauthored by Thomas Gegenhuber (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Markus Ellmer (University of Salzburg) and Elke Schüßler (Institute of Organization Science) has just been published in the leading management journal “Human Relations”. The article examines voice options for crowdworkers on six German medium-sized platforms offering a range of standardized and creative tasks. The authors find that platforms do provide voice mechanisms, albeit in varying degrees and levels.

Most importantly, while all platforms enabled crowdworkers to communicate task-related issues to ensure crowdworker availability and quality output, only few consulted crowdworkers on platform-wide organization. Differences in the ways in which voice was implemented were driven by considerations about costs, control and a crowd’s social structure, as well as by platforms’ varying interest in fair work standards. Overall, the study provides a nuanced picture of how employee voice is technologically and organisationally enabled and constrained in non-standard, digital work contexts.

Preparing for the "Lange Nacht der Forschung" in autumn 2020 we have created a privacy use case for homes. It serves parents who do not want the bedroom to be accessible all the time by the kids, and vice versa. With different combinations of sensors and a hub to combine several IoT components, a variety of access features, e.g. password, fingerprint, and RFID scan can be implemented on a model representation of a room (see picture). The provided instructions allow a step-by-step introduction as well as an informed exploration of the prepared infrastructure. In this way, each participants should be able to develop and design IoT applications in an inspiring environment.

Due to the appealing nature of this study, the authors have been invited to present their work as keynote speakers at Ingolstadt. For more info click here, opens an external URL in a new window.