Working Online: An Exploration of Social Recruiting and Digital Marketplaces
This chapter evidences how the practices of job search and recruitment within and beyond the networked knowledge economy are being partially or entirely reterritorialised as a result of the intermediation of online resources, and how these are principled on an analogous notion of reputation as value. This is illustrated via the discussion of empirical data from an international study on social recruiting, and a case study exploration of a digital marketplace for contractors, Elance. These examples evidence how the broad knowledge labour market is founded on the logic of the reputation economy and envisages how this promises to remain central in the next decades, simultaneously warning against the risks of an 'algocracy' based on the fetishism for algorithms and online rankings.