Exploring Organization through Contributions: using Activity Theory for the Study of Contemporary Digital Labour Practices
This chapter focuses on peer-production as a form of collaborative digital work, closely allied to crowdsourcing and other contemporary working practices that are mediated by digital platforms. Such platforms are a growing form of digital work; however, they raise complex methodological issues. Firs...
| Autores: | , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | capítulo de libro |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) |
| Repositorio: | Docta Complutense |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/5094 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/5094 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Activity Theory Commons-Based Peer Production Collaborative Economy Digital Labour Drupal Free/Libre Open Source Software Platform Economy Informática (Informática) Sociología Ciencias de la Información 1203.17 Informática 63 Sociología 5910.01 Información |
| Sumario: | This chapter focuses on peer-production as a form of collaborative digital work, closely allied to crowdsourcing and other contemporary working practices that are mediated by digital platforms. Such platforms are a growing form of digital work; however, they raise complex methodological issues. First, although often a single collaborative platform coordinates groups, work can be distributed globally. Second, multimodal approaches require the researcher to transition between online and offline media. Finally, it can be challenging to identify what is ‘work’ as activity boundaries are blurred. It is argued that the use of Activity Theory overcomes some of these issues and its utility in an analysis of the production of the open source software, Drupal, is demonstrated, highlighting the potential for Activity Theory to enable cross-contextual comparisons and proposing the concept of ‘socio-technical systems of contribution’ as a way to understand interactions between networks of collaboration. The limitations of the approach and potential future developments are noted. |
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