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This short document was prepared in collaboration between Ursula Huws, the Action Chair and the leader of Working Group 4, Pamela Meil, Director of International Studies at the Institute for Social Science Research (ISF), Munich, supported by Vassil Kirov, Associate Professor, Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria, with inputs from a wide range of policy stakeholders, who met in Brussels on June 9th to discuss a future policy agenda on virtual work.

The meeting took place at Avenue de Cortenbergh 30, 1040 Brussels from 10.30 to 17.00.

Over the past three and a half years, the Dynamics of Virtual Work COST Action has brought together leading scholars from a wide range of different academic disciplines in 31 European countries, plus several non-European ones, to map the state of the art on the impacts of digitisation on labour.

Working Group 4 of the Action has focussed on the policy impacts of these changes, interacting with a wide range of stakeholders from the European Commission, European Parliament, ILO, OECD, international trade union confederations, social partners, NGOs and other organisations. In particular, it has organised events and panel discussions on:

• The explosive growth of ‘crowdsourcing’
• The impact of user-generated content on creative work
• The rights of digital worker in online environments
• The measurement of digital work
• New forms of organisation and representation of digital workers
• Health, safety and wellbeing in digital work.

This event is designed to highlight the key findings, share them with a broader policy audience, and identify issues requiring further research and/or policy initiatives in the future.

The event took place at the offices of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) at 40 Rue Montoyer, Brussels. It was hosted by FEPS.

Designed to bring together key experts from statistics-producing and statistics-using bodies, the workshop focused on how to capture information in the official statistics on:

• new forms of work and employment enabled by digitisation
• employers’ use of digital labour including ‘crowdsourcing’
• online platforms that manage and co-ordinate work in the ‘sharing economy’

• Pamela Meil (ISF, Germany) presented the work of Working Group 4 of the COST Action.
• Elva Bova (FEPS) presented the work of the FEPS/UNI-Europa Digital Footprint Project being carried out in association with the University of Hertfordshire.

Formal presentations of relevant surveys and statistics were then made by:

• Greet Vermeylen (Eurofound)
• Janine Berg (ILO)
• Simon Joyce (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
• Peter Nielsen (Statistics Denmark)
• David Gierten (OECD)
• Steven Dhondt (TNO, Netherlands)
• Ilaria Masselli (Centre for European Policy Studies)

The meeting was chaired by Ursula Huws (University of Hertfordshire, UK).

Pictures  Presentations  Programme  Accommodation  Location  Local transport in Peniche  Venue  Setting

Sponsored by APDSI, the Portuguese Association for promoting the Information Society, APSIOT, the Portuguese Association of Sociology of Industry, Organisations and Work and APS, the Portuguese Association of Sociology.

                

User-generated content – impacts on work and labour: Policy implications for EU stakeholders

hosted by iMinds-SMIT (Studies Media Information Telecommunications), Vrije Universiteit Brussel.This event brought academic researchers together with a wide range of policy stakeholders.

The opening session of the event, on February 24th, took place in the COST offices

The remaining sessions, on February 25th was held at iMinds-SMIT

http://dynamicsofvirtualwork.com/brussels-workshop-presentations

Sponsored by COST (European Co-operation in Science and Technology), Work Organisation Labour and Globalisation, Competition and Change , Triple C and the Journal of Institutional Economics

Globalisation and technological change have transformed where people work, when and how. Digitisation of information has altered labour processes out of all recognition whilst telecommunications have enabled jobs to be relocated globally. But ICTs have also enabled the creation of entirely new types of ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ labour, both paid and unpaid, shifting the borderline between ‘play’ and ‘work’ and creating new types of unpaid labour connected with the consumption and co-creation of goods and services. The implications of this are far-reaching, both for policy and for scholarship. The dynamics of these changes cannot be captured adequately within the framework of any single academic discipline. On the contrary, they can only be understood in the light of a combination of insights from fields including political economy, the sociology of work, organisational theory, economic geography, development studies, industrial relations, comparative social policy, communications studies, technology policy and gender studies

COST Action IS1202 brings together an international network of leading experts from 31 European Countries with researchers from other parts of the world to develop a multi-faceted approach to understanding these phenomena. This international conference will open up an interactive dialogue between scholars both inside and outside the network.

Contents

Pictures Presentations

The aims of the workshop are to:

• highlight the value of a gender perspective in the analysis of the development and implications of virtual work, and to support the use of this perspective among members of the Action;
• review theoretical developments in gender and their application to virtual work; and
• contribute to the positioning of the Action’s analyses within current international thinking on gender and virtual work.

One of the core aims of this COST Action is to bring together the research perspectives and problematics of different disciplinary approaches to developments in virtual work, in order to create an intellectual dialogue to advance our understanding of these developments.  Although virtual workers have two sexes, so that gender is at the core of every aspect of virtual work, notably absent from many accounts of both workplace and technological developments has been a recognition of their gender dimensions.  Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers and writers on the gender relations of virtual work, this workshop will focus explicitly on the contribution of a gender perspective to an understanding of the development and implications of virtual work.

The Management Committee of the COST Action met from 10.00 to 16.00 on March 26th.

The Working Group Programme opened with a plenary session at 17.00 on October 26th, with a keynote speech from be Gina Neff, author of Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries, (Co-Winner, 2013 American Sociological Association Section on Communication and Information Technologies (CITASA) Book Award).
This was followed by a buffet reception.
Conference Venue and how to get there
Programme
Getting around in Bucharest
Accommodation
The programme included plenary sessions, with a particular focus on virtual work in creative and IT industries.
Some highlights
Tatiana Mazali spoke on ‘Digital creativity and new professions biographies in action to overcome the crisis’
Irene Mandl presented the latest results from the Eurofound Project on ‘New forms of Employment’
James Stewart presented his recent research on Online Work Exchanges.
Karin Hippler from Elance (a leading Online Work Exchange) spoke about the online work revolution while Mike Holderness from the European Federation of Journalists (representing creative and content-producing virtual workers) explored what this means for creative and workers. Vasile Baltac from the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (representing IT professionals) gave an overview of the changing landscape of eskills.
There was also be an interactive question-and-answer session for Early Stage Researchers and PhD students on ‘Getting published’.
Working Groups met in parallel to present their ongoing work and develop future plans.

Sponsored by COST (European Co-operation in Science and Technology), Work Organisation Labour and Globalisation, Competition and Change and Triple C

Globalisation and technological change have transformed where people work, when and how. Digitisation of information has altered labour processes out of all recognition whilst telecommunications have enabled jobs to be relocated globally. But ICTs have also enabled the creation of entirely new types of ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ labour, both paid and unpaid, shifting the borderline between ‘play’ and ‘work’ and creating new types of unpaid labour connected with the consumption and co-creation of goods and services. The implications of this are far-reaching, both for policy and for scholarship. The dynamics of these changes cannot be captured adequately within the framework of any single academic discipline. On the contrary, they can only be understood in the light of a combination of insights from fields including political economy, the sociology of work, organisational theory, economic geography, development studies, industrial relations, comparative social policy, communications studies, technology policy and gender studies

COST Action IS1202 brings together an international network of leading experts from 29 European Countries with researchers from other parts of the world to develop a multi-faceted approach to understanding these phenomena. This international conference will open up an interactive dialogue between scholars both inside and outside the network.