Building professional holding environments for crowd work job crafting through online communities

Abstract

Work is increasingly being organised via online platforms outside guiding organisational structures. Instead of having colleagues at work, crowd workers connect in online communities. We investigate how crowd workers build professional holding environments in online communities to compensate for the lack of organisational structures and we consider how they craft their crowd work activities to enhance their work experience and reduce its long-term precarity. Following a qualitative research design, this paper uses 675 forum interactions collected across six online communities. Based on our findings, we propose the concept of professional holding environments and provide a model for building such holding environments and job crafting in online communities. We thereby expand previous research on holding environments comprised of family members and friends by revealing the impact of professional online communities and their role in professionalisation and crafting supportive social structures in online crowd work.