DiPLab seminar welcomes Tim Christiaens, Francesca Ciulli and Ivana Vranjes for this academic year kick off session(Fri. 26 September 2025, 3:00 PM CET)

Our DiPLab seminar will welcome on September 26, 2025, at 3:00 PM CET, Assistant Professor Tim Christiaens (Tilburg University), Associate Professor Francesca Ciulli (Tilburg University), and Assistant Professor Ivana Vranjes (Tilburg University), for an exciting presentation titled Building community around what matters: network bricolage among online crowdworkers.

The seminar will be held in person at Shaker Space, located at the ISC-PIF, 113 rue Nationale, 75013 Paris, France. To register, click on the button below and fill out the form. The seminar is free to attend.

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Building community around what matters: network bricolage among online crowdworkers

Digital labor platforms rarely provide the social infrastructure that traditional workplaces offer, yet large numbers of online crowdwork platform (CLP) workers still succeed in forging a sense of community online. Building on theories of social well-being and scholarship on labor platforms in management and organization studies, we examine how such bottom-up community-building unfolds and how it affects workers’ well-being on Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific, and Clickworker. Over the past two years we carried out two complementary studies. We argue that CLP workers strike social connections in attempts to respond to so-called “matters of concerns”, i.e., challenges and opportunities emerging from the socio-technical environment of crowdwork platforms. Study 1 is qualitative study in which CLP workers answered open-ended questions about whether, how, and for what kinds of issues they communicate with peers. Study 2 is quantitative study measuring CLP workers’ preferred peer-communication modes and their psychological need fulfilment (autonomy, competence, relatedness) over time. Together, the studies suggest that (a) CLP workers (a) actively construct communities in spaces beyond the platforms themselves, (b) that they do out of various motivations, and (c) that these connections are systematically linked to their occupational well-being (regardless of the type of communication). The findings advance theory on platform labor by integrating qualitative insights into communicative practices with quantitative evidence on their consequences, and they suggest concrete leverage points for platforms and worker collectives aiming to foster sustainable digital workplaces.

Tim Christiaens is Assistant Professor of Economic Ethics and Philosophy at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on critical theory, workplace democracy, and the impact of digital technologies on labor. He has written books on the gig economy (Digital Working Lives, 2022) and Italian political philosophy (Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought, 2026). His research has appeared in journals like Big Data & Society, European Journal of Political Theory, Ethics & Information Technology, and Critical Policy Studies.

Francesca Ciulli is an Associate Professor of Organization Studies/Global Management of Social Issues at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on organizations and novel digital technologies, in relation to grand challenges, sustainability and sustainable development. She published her work in journals such as Journal of World Business, Journal of Business Ethics, Long Range Planning and Journal of Management Studies.

Ivana Vranjes is an Assistant Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the emergence and prevention of workplace mistreatment and the influence of technology in shaping employee wellbeing at work. She published her work in journals such as Journal of Applied Psychology and Academy of Management Review.