What are the implications of the digital economy in terms of mobility and immobility of highly skilled workers? Is the crowdsourcing phenomenon a window of opportunity to mitigate brain drain and avoid brain waste? Alisa Petroff, a postdoctoral researcher at GenTIC, addresses these unexplored issues in a new book chapter just published in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change.

 

In this publication, Alisa Petroff presents the findings of her research about the labour trajectories of skilled migrants in IT sectors. She argues that asylum seekers, who can wait for several years until they achieve refugee status and are entitled to work in a new country, might benefit from the regulatory lacunas of digital platforms. Furthermore, crowd work can mitigate the brain drain, especially in the Global South, where people can feel more “in charge” of their immobility and not trapped by it. On the other hand, the researcher points out the darker side of crowd platforms and the gig economy, as digital nomads are marked by a fragile legal status and limited access to social protection schemes.

 

Publication reference:
Petroff, A. [Alisa] (2022). Crowdsourcing in ICT Fields: The Link Between Mobility and Digital Labor Markets in Highly Skilled Tasks. In R. Baikady, S. Sajid, V. Nadesan, J. Przeperski, M. R. Islam & J. Gao (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_254-1

 

Related links:

IN3 Blog post “Desired immobility and hypermobility”, by Alisa Petroff