Expertise on Display: To Compete in Expertise on the Line Markets

• In Event: Disturbances, Recreation, and Renovation of Labor: AI, Robots, Platforms, and Algorithms - II

Abstract

We have analyzed workers using online work platforms, in order to understand the work that holds features of expertise, detaches itself from the personhood, and destabilizes the understanding of expertise as an agency related activity. Selling expert work online breaks the expertise into activities defined anew in each merchandised trade action, and blurring the boundaries between trading of commodities and commodified skills. Typically online expert work assignments relate to information technology, translation, or designing tasks, such as designing the outlook of mobile applications. We have analyzed in particular expert work on one of the largest expert online platforms, Upwork, which mediates on demand skilled white-collar jobs, such as translation, designing, and technology development tasks, and rates their tasks and skills. We carried out an online survey to workers using the Upwork platform. The survey consisted of questions on workers’ educational and other background, experiences regarding online work platforms, and their attitudes in respect to working habits and preferences. (Pajarinen et al. 2018). The rating, combined with the competition against unknowns, has gendered effects as well as effects on the understanding of complexity of defining expertise, for example, as by background variables, females, non-natives, and those having higher level education regarded the rating system more stressful than their counterparts. The paper addresses the invisibility of agency vis a vis the expertise as commodified traded object.

Author

• Anne Kovalainen, University of Turku, Turku School of Economics