About Winter School. From Uber to Amazon Mechanical Turk

From the 23rd to the 25th of November ​the Centre for European Policy Studies will host a Winter School in the context of the INGRID FP7 project. 

The topic selected for this year is “From Uber to Amazon Mechanical Turk: Non-traditional labour markets driven by technological and organisational change”. The objective is to gather researchers and practitioners interested in these recent but interesting shifts in the labour market. 

Technology is a powerful driver for change in the world of labour. The objective of the third edition of the InGRID winter school is to aggregate scholars and policy-makers interested in two recent but rapidly growing phenomena: the sharing econ­omy and crowdsourcing. More specifically, we are interested in the labour aspects of these innovation: Do they lead to a growth in the share of free-lance workers? What are the working conditions of crowdsourced workers? Do we need to adapt our definitions of labour to fit these new challenges? Do we observe a blurring of the borders between work and leisure in the sharing economy?

General information

Technology is a powerful driver for change in the world of labour. The objective of the InGRID winter school is to aggregate scholars and policymakers interested in two recent but rapidly growing phenomena: the sharing econ­omy and crowdsourcing. More specifically, we are interested in the labour aspects of these innovation: Do they lead to a growth in the share of freelance workers? What are the working conditions of crowdsourced workers? Do we need to adapt our definitions of labour to fit these new challenges? Do we observe a blurring of the borders between work and leisure in the sharing economy?

Given the limited knowledge on these questions, we are open to accepting different types of contributions: from theoretical work, even model­based, to more empirical analysis, based for instance on surveys. We expect applications from a broad range of disciplines: from big-data analysts to political scientists, from economists to sociolo­gists.

Lectures and topics

The sharing economy

Innovations like Uber and AirB&B are stirring up heated debates. These innovations, which some consider ‘disruptive’, can be analysed from many different angles: Who benefits from them? Who loses? Do they challenge our definitions of labour? Do they support or counteract the generalised trend in society towards inequality? In this session we would like to ask the pioneers of this new literature in the field of labour studies to share their views on the subject. We also welcome the view of policymakers who find themselves in the position of giving answers to these issues with very little backup from the research community.

Crowdsourcing and contests

Crowdsourcing constitutes a cheap and quicker option for outsourcing, but the phenomenon has much broader ramifications. The definition of crowdsourcing can be wide and includes experiments like Wikipedia, where the construction of an encyclopaedia is in the hands of the ‘crowd’. Here we restrict the focus to crowdsourcing of paid labour, which gives the possibility to assign a specific task – ranging from coding a web programme, to a translation or a data collection – to a worker in an unspecified location. In this session, we would like to understand the labour implications of the phe­nomenon, for workers in this new sector as well as for the incumbents of the traditional mar­kets.

Are we all going to end up self-employed?

Self-employment makes a considerable contribution to the EU economy in terms of entrepreneur­ship and job creation. In 2014 the population of self-employed (without employees) counted almost 22 million individuals, equivalent to 9% of the European labour force. Self­employment carries a degree of risk and vulnerability for the individual, both in the short and long run. Countries like Italy, Greece and Spain have the highest rates of self­employment in Europe.

Can one point to evidence in the last few years or decades of an increase of such labour market arrangements? Are work experiences becoming shorter? Are they driven by technology or by insti­tutional factors? Is the ‘one job for a lifetime’ really over? In this session, the speakers will shed light on the drivers contributing to the recent growth in self-employment and the consequences that need to be addressed by policymakers.

Employment and technological change

Technological developments, from big data to cloud computing, have fundamentally changed the workplace. Nevertheless, the extent to which workers participate in these changes varies immensely from one situation to another. The trend towards specialisation has the effect of increasingly frag­menting the workplace, sometimes replicating the power relationships observed in the ‘Fordist’ econ­omy of previous generations, but magnified by the pressure towards new forms of work organisation. The increased specialisation also means that the useful knowledge, vital for mastering the new tech­nologies is concentrated within a few privileged individuals, while the majority are reduced to the status of easily replaceable workers.

 

Venue and organisation

CEPS, Brussels - Belgium

 

Who can apply?

Financial information for participants

Registration fee

Attendance of the winter school is free-of-charge.

Travel limits

CEPS will reimburse travel costs up to a maximum of 400 euro. For travel costs exceeding this amount, prior approval of CEPS is needed. These travel costs include airfares as well as any other local/ground transport costs from and to the airport.

Air travel

In all cases, only economy airfares will be reimbursed except in very special circumstances and only with prior approval from UoE. First class, business class and premium economy tickets will be reimbursed at the level of the economy fare. In order to be reimbursed for your flight, you must include a printed itinerary showing the paid airfare/or original invoice and your boarding passes.

Rail travel

Participants electing to travel by train must take advantage of early booking fares where this is cheaper than purchasing tickets closer to the departure date. Reimbursement is made for second-class travel only.

• Download call
• Programme (available soon)
• For applicants
• Financial information for participants
• Practical information
• Terms and conditions
• Contact: monica.iturriaga@ceps.eu

This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:

http://www.ceps.eu/events/winter-school-uber-amazon-mechanical-turk