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Academics and practitioners are increasingly discussing the role of crowdsourcing initiatives in dealing with the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with their role in an emergency context in general. However, empirical evidence about the role of crowdsourcing initiatives in an emergency context is still scarce. This paper aims to address this gap in knowledge.

The authors adopted an inductive approach to investigate how companies leveraged crowdsourcing initiatives to address the issues posed by COVID-19. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The selection of the interviewees was based on a purposive sampling strategy. Data were analysed through thematic analysis.

The analysis led to the identification and examination of drivers (e.g. preserving relationships with customers), advantages (e.g. increased demand for services) and disadvantages (e.g. increased platform cost) of implementing crowdsourcing initiatives during COVID-19. By leveraging the findings, this paper suggests future research opportunities. Relevant future research opportunities include: (1) quantitatively evaluating the economic impact of crowdsourcing initiatives during a disruptive event and (2) examining how the sector in which the company operates influences the beneficial and detrimental effects of crowdsourcing initiatives on company performance.

The involvement of crowds as innovation partners has provided unique opportunities for companies to innovate and address the challenging scenario. The scientific literature about the role of crowdsourcing during COVID-19 is growing. However, there is still a scarcity of empirical evidence about the mechanisms underpinning the use of crowdsourcing during the pandemic. By leveraging semi-structured interviews, this paper addresses this relevant gap in knowledge.

In recent years, crowdsourcing – an open and innovative model for outsourcing tasks to a crowd – has become popular for production processes, allowing organizations and firms in different industries to access external skills and expertise efficiently. Companies have opened their innovation processes to crowds outside their boundaries, and users and customers are often involved in developing products in line with market needs. This work aims to investigate the link between crowdsourcing, production and quality to better understand this new interesting phenomenon.

An explicit and systematic method for reviewing the literature was used. Through the selection and analysis of the relevant articles in the field, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons, risks and opportunities, disadvantages, or concerns, as addressed in the literature, for the adoption of crowdsourcing in the production processes.

It identifies where, how and to what extent crowdsourcing can be applied profitably within the production of products and services, highlighting how crowdsourcing could affect product and process quality. Finally, some directions for future research are outlined from the analysis conducted.

This work applied the systematic literature review to investigate and evaluate the actual use and impact of crowdsourcing on the production process, focusing on quality enhancement contribution.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.