Transforming spare into productive time: investigating turkers motivation at work

Every human being that has almost a basic literacy is able to accomplish simple routine information-processing tasks like categorizing objects or labeling and comparing images. These tasks that are trivial and simple to describe for humans but challenging even for the most sophisticated computer. Therefore, for all this tasks human capital rather than computer capital seems to be more suitable and productive. Nowadays, in response to this need, we are experiencing the growth of new labor market intermediaries over the Web where businesses outsource routine work from remote locations to an indistinct mass of workers and people lend their basic information processing capabilities to employers. In this paper we focus on a new electronic market intermediary called Mechanical Turk and on motivations expressed by its workers (known as turkers) using the Grounded Theory methodology applied to attestations left by turkers in online forums and blogs. Above the others the core category emerging from our study is “the transformation of spare time in productive time” that makes turkers different from teleworkers and therefore eligible to be studied. Turkers don’t have a fixed employer, they have time to spend and they want it to be the more productive possible. And Mechanical Turk is at present the best tool to invest spare time