Towards a taxonomy of digital work

Despite the increasing importance of digitization for economy and society, there is few structuring of the very heterogenous kinds of digital work. Representatives from business, politics and science need a basis for the development of strategies to encounter the challenges that result from this digitization. We aim at delivering a contribution to that basis by systematically investigating what different types of digital work exist and by developing a taxonomy. As a first important step towards this goal, we investigate in this paper what digital work tools exist since such tools are a major constituent element of digital work. Using a hybrid approach including both a deductive conceptual-to-empirical and an inductive empirical-to-conceptual procedure, we create an artifact that gives business leaders an overview of existing digital work tools as a basis for strategic decisions and at the same time provides researchers with stimuli for future investigations in the dynamic domain of digital work.