Abstract
We examine jobs on a popular freelancing platform that are marked or described as potentially ongoing jobs. We consider them to have characteristics of outsourcing tasks, but they are geared towards individuals rather than companies. Our empirical research shows that such jobs are offered in programming like in traditional IT outsourcing but also in many Internet-related jobs like content writing and writing in social media, search engine advertising, or e-mail marketing. Most employers are located in the U.S. or other English-speaking countries. This makes English language skills very valuable. The data indicate that jobs are often outsourced to countries with lower wage levels. However, employers often try to outsource them to the country where they are located, or at least to a country in a similar time-zone. In such cases, they are obviously willing to pay more for the work in order to have better communication possibilities. Outsourcing to individuals creates opportunities for these individuals. However, given their relatively weak position towards outsourcing companies they risk more and probably earn less than employees in these companies or at outsourcing suppliers.
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The scraped data from Upwork needed considerable preprocessing to make it usable for analysis. For example, the reviews statistics for the client (9B in Fig. 1) were scraped like “4.90 of 66 reviews” in one column. We divided that column into two columns called “ReviewsScore” and “ReviewsCount” and deleted the words “of” and “reviews” to switch the data format from string to number. Further, we sorted out invalid job postings. First, we identified and deleted duplicates that occurred because of our time lag in the scraping process or because of job postings using more than one of the keywords. Second, we identified, reviewed, and deleted job postings having a negation of one of our keywords, e.g., “This is not an ongoing task” by using a regular expression:
/.*([Nn]o|[Nn]ot)(\S|\s|\s[Aa]\s|\s[Aa]n\s)([Ll]ong.[Tt]erm|[Ll]ongterm|[Oo]n.[Gg]oing| [Oo]ngoing|[Cc]ontinuous|[Ll]onger.term|[Ff]urther.[Ww]ork|[Ll]ong.[Tt]ime).*/
Less than 20 job postings had such a negation and all of them were deleted from the dataset after reviewing them. Lastly, we added an additional variable for the broad job category of a job posting because the given job category is quite specific (e.g., “CMS Development”, 2 in Fig. 1). Although the broad job category is not given in the job posting, every specific job category is predefined and clearly attributed to a broad job category by Upwork. We retrieved the attributions with the creation tool for job posting within Upwork.
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Alpar, P., Osterbrink, L., Klein, E. (2020). Outsourcing and Offshoring to Individuals. In: Oshri, I., Kotlarsky, J., Willcocks, L.P. (eds) Digital Technologies for Global Sourcing of Services. Global Sourcing 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 410. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66834-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66834-1_6
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