Crowd workers are distributed and decentralized. While decentralization is designed to utilize independent judgment to promote high-quality results, it paradoxically undercuts behaviors and institutions that are critical to high-quality work. Reputation is one central example: crowdsourcing systems depend on reputation scores from decentralized workers and requesters, but these scores are notoriously inflated and uninformative. In this paper, we draw inspiration from historical worker guilds (e.g., in the silk trade) to design and implement crowd guilds: centralized groups of crowd workers who collectively certify each other's quality through double-blind peer assessment. A two-week field experiment compared crowd guilds to a traditional decentralized crowd work model. Crowd guilds produced reputation signals more strongly correlated with ground-truth worker quality than signals available on current crowd working platforms, and more accurate than in the traditional model.
Today, the intellectual inheritance of guilds persists via professional organizations, which replicate some of their benefits @cite_20 . Professions such as architecture, engineering, geology, and land surveying require varying lengths of apprenticeships before one can gain professional certification, which holds great legal and reputational weight @cite_0 @cite_47 . However, these professions fall into traditional work models and do not cater for global and location-independent flexible employment @cite_26 . Non-traditional work arrangements such as freelancing do not provide common work benefits such as economic security, career development, training, mentoring and social interaction with peers, which are legally essential for classification as full-time work in many cases @cite_40 . Although the support of professional organizations exists for freelance work, much of the underlying value of guilds does not.
@cite_26 @cite_0 @cite_40 @cite_47 @cite_20
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What if, rather than relying on an employer or the government to meet their human needs, individual workers joined independent organizations whose primary purpose was to provide stable "homes" as they moved from job to job? We call these organizations "guilds" by analogy to the craft associations of the Middle Ages, and in this paper we examine what they might do and how they might emerge. Guilds are social scientists’ favoured historical example of institutions generating a ‘social capital’ of trust that benefited entire economies. This article considers this view in the light of empirical findings for early modern Europe. It draws the distinction between a ‘particularized’ trust in persons of known attributes and a ‘generalized’ trust that applies even to strangers. This is paralleled by the distinction between a ‘differential’ trust in institutions that enforce the rights of certain groups and a ‘uniform’ trust in impartial institutions that enforce the rights of all. Guilds had the potential to generate the particularized and differential trust to solve market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation, although the empirical findings suggest that they often failed to fulfil this potential. Guilds also had the potential to abuse their trust, and the empirical findings show that they indeed manipulated their social capital of shared norms, common information, mutual sanctions, and collective political action to benefit their members at others’ expense, blocking the spread of generalized and uniform trust. Counter to the assumptions of social capital theory, the example of pre-industrial guilds suggests that the particularized and differential trust fostered by associative institutions do not favour but hinder the generalized and uniform trust fostered by impartial institutions. This title looks at the likely evolution of the U.S. workforce and workplace over the next 10 to 15 years, focusing on demographics, technology and globalization. I would like to thank Howard Aldrich, Graham Astley, Rudi Bresser, Mark Ebers, Wilfried Gotsch, John Langton, Johannes Pennings, and four anonymous ASO reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. A theoretical frame is developed that links the genesis of formal organizations to societ al evolution. This theoretical frame lends itself to an analysis of the peculiarities of the craft guilds and the developments that caused their decline and replacement by formal organizations. Medieval guilds were not yet formal organizations but formed important predecessor institutions in the evolutionary process that led to the emergence of organizations.'