Attitudes Toward And Experiences of Digital Labour by Current and Potential Crowdworkers: A South African Perspective
type: CreativeWork
description: Digital labour is the creation of new products and services through mainly various digital media forms in exchange for a form of remuneration. Digital labour addresses some of their critical issues in South Africa, such as high unemployment, low income and others. Digital labour initiatives, particularly crowdsourcing and others are thought to provide essential benefits such as flexible working times and skills development. However, digital labour can also bring about drawbacks such as the exploitation of workers and low remuneration. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the attitudes toward and experiences of digital labour in South Africa, with a primary focus on crowdworkers in South Africa. A framework built from certain concepts described in the literature review would be used to guide the research. The main research questions would be concerned investigating how the attitudes and experiences affect the intention to participate, the initial and the continued participation in digital labour. The research data were obtained by conducting an online survey amongst 70 participants who would either be potential or current crowdworkers. The research data were analysed using a mixed methods approach, with quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques being used. From the research data collected, some notable findings that unearthed critical digital labour insights included the relationship between the attitude of personal information security and the initial participation in digital labour. This relationship was found to be considerably significant. Also, the relationship between the barrier of internet access cost and the actual participation in digital labour was not significant which was unexpected in a developing country context. The experiential expectations around a living wage and sharing of knowledge notably had the strongest relationship with the continued participation in digital labour of all the experience aspects. However some survey resp…
abstract: Digital labour is the creation of new products and services through mainly various digital media forms in exchange for a form of remuneration. Digital labour addresses some of their critical issues in South Africa, such as high unemployment, low income and others. Digital labour initiatives, particularly crowdsourcing and others are thought to provide essential benefits such as flexible working times and skills development. However, digital labour can also bring about drawbacks such as the exploitation of workers and low remuneration. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the attitudes toward and experiences of digital labour in South Africa, with a primary focus on crowdworkers in South Africa. A framework built from certain concepts described in the literature review would be used to guide the research. The main research questions would be concerned investigating how the attitudes and experiences affect the intention to participate, the initial and the continued participation in digital labour. The research data were obtained by conducting an online survey amongst 70 participants who would either be potential or current crowdworkers. The research data were analysed using a mixed methods approach, with quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques being used. From the research data collected, some notable findings that unearthed critical digital labour insights included the relationship between the attitude of personal information security and the initial participation in digital labour. This relationship was found to be considerably significant. Also, the relationship between the barrier of internet access cost and the actual participation in digital labour was not significant which was unexpected in a developing country context. The experiential expectations around a living wage and sharing of knowledge notably had the strongest relationship with the continued participation in digital labour of all the experience aspects. However some survey resp…
author: Chidoori, Cuthbert
keywords: Information Systems
date published: 2020
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:22:37Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of Information Systems

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32562