Search

eLancing, or Internet freelancing, is spreading at an incredibly fast pace worldwide. The eLancing work environment is called a “marketplace,” which is a website where individuals interested in being hired and employers looking for individuals to perform some type of work meet. eLancing allows individuals from literally anywhere in the world to sign up and complete work using the Internet for an employer who literally can also be anywhere in the world. eLancing boasts millions of users and billions of dollars in transactions and it involves fundamental changes in the nature of work and in the employer–worker relationship. We discuss eLancing and challenges and opportunities it creates for human resource management (HRM) research and practice. Also, we offer a research agenda with the goal of understanding eLancing and its effects, particularly pertaining to the core HRM areas of job design and analysis, workforce planning, recruitment, selection, training and development, performance management, compensation, and legal issues. Given the increased importance of eLancing worldwide and its implications for worldwide work arrangements in the 21st century's international society, results of such scholarly research have the potential to help narrow the science–practice gap and also elevate the status, perceived value-added, and organizational and societal influence of HRM and related fields.

We propose the use of eLancing as a natural environment to conduct field experiments in entrepreneurship research. eLancing, or Internet freelancing, involves millions of people around the world and consists of websites that link individuals and organizations interested in purchasing services or commissioning people to complete some type of work with individuals and organizations interested in providing such services or performing such work. We provide a description of how to conduct practically feasible field experiments using eLancing's natural environment to investigate important substantive areas such as entrepreneurial team efficacy and how execution differs from opportunity recognition, among other areas. Using eLancing to conduct field experiments allows researchers to overcome pervasive methodological challenges as revealed by a content analysis of the 175 empirical articles published in the Journal of Business Venturing from January 2005 to November 2010. Specifically, eLancing allows researchers to improve generalizability, address the omitted variables problem, improve the operationalization of constructs, improve confidence regarding the nature of causal relationships, and address other challenges such as participant bias and selective survival. Thus, using eLancing as a methodological tool has the potential to lead to important theoretical advancements and subsequent practical applications.