No Workflow Can Ever Be Enough: How Crowdsourcing Workflows Constrain Complex Work

The dominant crowdsourcing infrastructure today is the workflow, which decomposes goals into small independent tasks. However, complex goals such as design and engineering have remained stubbornly difficult to achieve with crowdsourcing workflows. Is this due to a lack of imagination, or a more fundamental limit? This paper explores this question through in-depth case studies of 22 workers across six workflow-based crowd teams, each pursuing a complex and interdependent web development goal. We used an inductive mixed method approach to analyze behavior trace data, chat logs, survey responses and work artifacts to understand how workers enacted and adapted the crowdsourcing workflows. Our results indicate that workflows served as useful coordination artifacts, but in many cases critically inhibited crowd workers from pursuing real-time adaptations to their work plans. However, the CSCW and organizational behavior literature argues that all sufficiently complex goals require open-ended adaptation. If complex work requires adaptation but traditional static crowdsourcing workflows can't support it, our results suggest that complex work may remain a fundamental limitation of workflow-based crowdsourcing infrastructures.