2024/01/01 by Devika Narayan · 1 voice · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #Digital Platforms and Economics #Sharing Economy and Platforms
paper · doi:10.1177/29768624241263071
openalex publication_date 2024/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Some might lament ‘platform studies’ lack of internal coherence. However, the problem with platform studies is not that it is too fragmented or dispersed to be considered a field. On the contrary, the problem is that it is not varied enough: it remains heavily concentrated around a handful of themes. Given how recently both the phenomenon as we recognise it today and the scholarly field emerged, this is not surprising. Disciplines have approached the rise of digital platforms with their respective priorities and toolkits. For sociologists, the platform economy was seen as almost solely constituted by gig work platforms (Vallas and Schor, 2020). For media and communication studies, the focus was social media platforms and digital culture (Dijck, 2013). For management studies, new competitive dynamics and platform strategy was the main area of interest (Adner, 2023; Jacobides et al., 2018). Research on platforms has developed enough to warrant concerted efforts to take stock and make disciplinary priorities explicit, so that the field, instead of being restricted by these, further opens up in scope. Additionally, it is important to connect siloed debates, while at the same time extending the overall heterogeneity of the field (editorial statement).<br/>Digital platforms operate squarely in the analytic terrain of political economy – that of capital, labour and the state – even if this framing is not always explicitly mobilised. Discussion about corporate monopolies, regulation and labour relations has exploded. While empirical developments such as the rise of massive technology firms and their disruptive effects have demanded enquiry, the scholarly traditions devoted to the study of corporate capitalism have atrophied over time. This then is the task: to simultaneously rediscover and reinvent the critical study of industrial structure and capitalist dynamics in the age of platforms. Without this, platform scholarship will be left without an anchor, lacking a rich theory-informed approach, not just to discrete empirical phenomena but to the more abstract and connective structures that shape these.<br/>Recognising the full breadth and multi-layered nature of platformisation as a process is key. A digital platform is a collection of socio-technical assets that offer a stable, yet flexible interface, and therefore bring into its fold a range of user-actors (Plantin et al., 2018). This infrastructure is entangled with specific organisational forms, financial logics, regulatory practices and labour relations. Further, the ambit of platform economies is expansionary. It impinges on and transforms existing industrial and corporate practices. Evidence of platform-centric models altering realms as varied as ride-hailing, music, banking, film, advertising, retail, automotive and electronics is unmistakable. Importantly, the story far exceeds the direct arena of the tech giants (see editorial statement). In shaking up the terms of competition and reducing barriers to entry, platform-driven models put pressure on large incumbent firms that operate in their respective sectors. How more traditional (non-tech) firms adopt and devise digital platforms and data strategies is of increasing relevance. While some might critique the looseness of digital platforms as a concept, the elasticity of the concept mirrors the elasticity and portability of the platform model.<br/>Platform studies needs more concerted theoretical and empirical exposition of the overlapping domains of digital technology, the capitalist firm and market dynamics. Retheorising the intersections between technologies, organisations and markets would not only better explain effects and discrete phenomena (datafication, surveillance, growth, monopolisation, etc) but also widen and deepen our understanding of ‘platform capitalism’ at large (Srnicek, 2017).