• Students are familiar with the principles underlying platform- and crowd-based organizing.
• They possess valid in-depth knowledge about one platform—derived from academically disciplined first-hand experience, internal and external validation, and critical reflection.
• They can think beyond extant knowledge on platform- and crowd-based organizing because they are capable of using multi-case comparison to arrive at creative insights and fruitful questions.
• Students possess enhanced observational and reflective skills, and a greater capacity for theorizing.
• Students understand the nature of scientific knowledge and can contribute to its production.

• LO1: examine, analyze, explain and critically evaluate the mechanisms and principles underlying platform- and crowd-based organizing.
• LO2: identify relevant manifestations of platform- and crowd-based organizing, examine them for latent meaning and develop original conclusions, from both a researcher and a practitioner perspective
• LO3: compare different cases of platform- and crowd-based organizing to develop original conclusions, from both a researcher and a practitioner perspective
• LO4: independently design, execute and present research projects with a particular focus on digital ethnography
• LO5: design and carry out field experiments (i.e. experimental behavior) to validate propositions and generate knowledge

• platforms as new digital exchange infrastructures,
• platform-hosted crowds as an arguably new type of collective actor,
• and platform- and crowd-based organizing as a new frontier for managing in the digital era.
  
  

Crowd-based organizing is essentially concerned with sustainably mobilizing large numbers of distributed actors (i.e. the crowd) and structuring their activities in order to achieve specific purposes, thus requiring governance and business models. Platform-hosted crowds engage in a large variety of productive activities: Prominent business-to-customer examples include crowdbased ride hailing (e.g. Uber, Lyft) and accommodation (e.g. Airbnb, HomeAway); as exemplary business-to-business cases, consider creative industries, specifically crowdsourced graphic design (e.g. 99designs) and crowd-produced stock photo (e.g. iStock, Shutterstock). Furthermore, crowds provide capital and labor: as for the former, so-called crowdfunding ranges from investment to donation (e.g. Kickstarter, Indiegogo); as for the latter, crowds rendering unspecific services (e.g. MTurk, Upwork) act as digital workforces that, upon request, execute simple or complex tasks, specified and paid for by individual or corporate customers.

Platform-hosted crowds engage in a large variety of productive activities: Prominent business-to-customer examples include crowd-based ride hailing (e.g. Uber, Lyft) and accommodation (e.g. Airbnb, HomeAway); as exemplary business-to-business cases, consider creative industries, specifically crowdsourced graphic design (e.g. 99designs, DesignCrowd) and crowd-produced stock photo (e.g. iStock, Shutterstock). Fur-thermore, crowds provide capital and labor: as for the former, so-called crowdfunding ranges from invest-ment to donation (e.g. Kickstarter, Indiegogo); as for the latter, crowds rendering unspecific services (e.g. MTurk, Clickworker) act as digital workforces that, upon request, execute simple tasks, specified and paid for by individual or corporate customers.

Interestingly, our knowledge about these platforms has remained fragmented: How do digital platforms, run by relatively small organizations, impact society and create significant monetary and non-monetary value through mobilizing and organizing large platform-enabled crowds. In this seminar students contribute to closing this gap by conducting qualitative empirical research on crowd-enabling platforms—predominantly drawing on ethnographic methods, specifically so-called ‘netnography’ and participatory observation.