This article analyses the ways in which creative crowdwork is managed and controlled within social and economic power relations. It presents findings from a research project on creative crowdworkers focussing on aspects of management and control. The research shows that the design of the platforms and the strategies of their operating companies clearly structure the triangular relationship between platform, clients and workers. In addition to bureaucratic rules and surveillance exercised by the platform, rating opportunities and other control features utilised by clients strongly impact on crowdworkers’ time use, income and creativity and thus on their working and living conditions.

This article discusses various aspects of labour processes in services characterized by value chains that cross organizational, company, regional or national boundaries. Starting from value chain analysis it first addresses the main conceptual issues in the investigation of service value chains and networks from a labour process perspective. Second, it highlights three particular themes in the analysis of the labour process in services and illustrates these with empirical examples: modularization of services and codification of knowledge, organizational flexibility and flexible employment, and the concurrence of co-operation and competition. In the conclusion, the article sketches significant characteristics of services and service work that need to come into focus in value chain and network analysis from a labour process perspective.

The growing use of temporary contracts in Europe raises the question of whether long-term employment relations are eroding in coordinated market economies, where protective regulations are historically strong. This paper, using data from establishment-level surveys conducted in 2003–2005, examines the institutional and organizational factors that have shaped the extent of use of temporary contracts in call centers in six European countries: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. While differences in regulatory regimes appear to have influenced employer behavior in some cases, the exceptions are striking, as the countries with the most stringent restrictions on temporary workers were among the heaviest users of such workers. By contrast, firm-level strategies that retained work in-house and invested in work force skills and training were consistent predictors of the use of long-term contracts as opposed to temporary ones.

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This study compares the effectiveness of bargaining institutions in regulating temporary contracts in Austrian, German and Spanish call centres. Unions’ capacities to bargain over the expansion and conditions of temporary contract use are shaped by bargaining structures and state regulation of various temporary contract types. National capacities to regulate the use of outsourcing and coordinate collective agreements with workplace bargaining are particularly effective in limiting the use of temporary contracts. Nonetheless, cross-national analysis indicates that employers are adept at exploiting very specific forms of temporary contracts in order to circumvent regulations and evade collective bargaining.