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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

5. Working Online: An Exploration of Social Recruiting and Digital Marketplaces

Author : Alessandro Gandini

Published in: The Reputation Economy

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

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Abstract

This chapter evidences how the practices of job search and recruitment within and beyond the networked knowledge economy are being partially or entirely reterritorialised as a result of the intermediation of online resources, and how these are principled on an analogous notion of reputation as value. This is illustrated via the discussion of empirical data from an international study on social recruiting, and a case study exploration of a digital marketplace for contractors, Elance. These examples evidence how the broad knowledge labour market is founded on the logic of the reputation economy and envisages how this promises to remain central in the next decades, simultaneously warning against the risks of an ‘algocracy’ based on the fetishism for algorithms and online rankings.

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An official report of the 2014 International Study on Social Recruiting is available at the following link: http://www.adecco.com/en-US/Industry-Insights/Documents/social-recruiting/adecco-global-social-recruiting-survey-global-report.pdf (Accessed October 28, 2015).

An extended and articulated version of these findings with a specific focus on Italy can be found in Ivana Pais and Alessandro Gandini, “Looking for a job online. An international study on Social Recruiting,” Sociologia del Lavoro 137 (2015): 115–129.

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For the latest data on Upwork, see https://www.upwork.com/about/ (Accessed October 29, 2015).

On the founding principles of digital ethnography here conceived, see Alessandro Caliandro, “Ethnography in Digital Spaces: Ethnography of Virtual Worlds, Netnography, and Digital Ethnography,” in Handbook of Anthropology in Business, ed. Patti Sunderland, and Rita Denny (Walnut Creek, CA, Left Coast Press, 2014).

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For more detailed information on the methodology used for the digital ethnographic observation of Upwork, please see Alessandro Gandini, “Assessing the job quality of ‘digital professions’: a case of extreme work”, Studi di Sociologia 3 (2015).

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Alessandro Gandini, “Online Social Influence and the Evaluation of Creative Practice: A Critique of Klout,” in Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts, ed. Cecilia H. Suhr (New York: Routledge, 2014), 150–168; Johnnathan Messias et al., “You followed my bot! Transforming robots into influential users in Twitter,” First Monday, 18.7 (2013).

Phoebe Moore and Andrew Robinson, “The quantified self: What counts in the neoliberal workplace,” New Media & Society (2015) DOI: 1461444815604328 (2015).

Title: Working Online: An Exploration of Social Recruiting and Digital Marketplaces
Author: Alessandro Gandini
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Book: The Reputation Economy
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56105-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-56107-7

Copyright Year: 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56107-7_5