Is There PAPA in Crowd Work? : A Literature Review on Ethical Dimensions in Crowdsourcing

The phenomenon of crowdsourcing has emerged as a new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. This novel socio-technical arrangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature and takes place in information systems (IS) in which humans face many threats to their dignity. For this reason, the importance of ethical issues within this new form of employment arises. Hence, in this paper we focus on the ethical issues in crowd work – a perspective that has been largely neglected by current crowdsourcing research. We analyze recent crowdsourcing literature and extract ethical issues by following the PAPA (privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility of information) concept, a well-established approach in IS. The review focuses on the individual perspective of crowdworkers, which addresses their working conditions and benefits. Although, the literature review exhibits that there are PAPA dimensions in crowdsourcing, only few focus on the crowdworkers as individuals. Our findings contribute to further research in crowdsourcing by introducing an ethical framework and give practical insight into how to design sustainable and ethical crowd work.