Digital Battlegrounds: The Power Dynamics and Governance of Contemporary Platforms
Abstract
The ubiquity of digital platforms is undeniable, as is their transactional efficiency and world-flattening possibilities. Yet, these platforms are contested battlegrounds where stakeholder power struggles reflect and influence broader societal turbulence. In the emerging era, alongside the blinding speed and global reach of the gig economy are looming specters of rentier capitalism, digi-serfdom, misinformation, data exploitation, digital addiction, and near-ungovernable algorithmic agents. To date, scholarly focus on digital platforms has been on their transactional features and impacts, dimensionalizing governance mechanisms as emanating from old economy conceptions of bottom-up or top-down checks and balances, or incentives and efficiencies. These emphases, while useful for understanding managerial control of digital platforms, largely ignore the extent to which digital platforms are contested organizational spaces, shaped by complex power dynamics. Foucault (1998: 63) asserted that power is everywhere, and that those who hold power are rarely well-understood by those who are subject to it. In seeking to rebalance and reorient digital platform research, we analyze and integrate existing research along four dimensions that shape platform power dynamics: actors, relations, faces, and struggle. We establish a future research agenda—including six testable propositions—that more thoroughly engages the critical, yet untapped, expertise of management scholars concerning platform power.
REFERENCES
- 2019. What is different about digital strategy? From quantitative to qualitative change. Strategy Science, 4: 253–261. Google Scholar
- 2022. Antiracist curriculum and digital platforms: Evidence from Black Lives Matter. Management Science, 68: 2932–2948. Google Scholar
- 2020. Artificial intelligence as digital agency. European Journal of Information Systems, 29: 1–8. Google Scholar
- 2022. The translucent hand of managed ecosystems: Engaging communities for value creation and capture. Academy of Management Annals, 16: 70–101.Link , Google Scholar
- 2022. Governing digital platform power for industrial development: Towards an entrepreneurial-regulatory state. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 46: 1431–1454. Google Scholar
- 2017. Value grabbing: A political ecology of rent. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 28: 28–47. Google Scholar
- 2023. The emotional and financial impact of de-platforming on creators at the margins. Social Media + Society, 9: doi:10.1177/205630512311551. Google Scholar
- 2022. We are all theorists of technology now. Organization Science, 33: 1–18. Google Scholar
- 2009. The architecture of platforms: A unified view. Platforms, Markets and Innovation, 32: 19–44. Google Scholar
- 2019. Negotiating the platform pivot: From participatory digital ecosystems to infrastructures of everyday life. Geography Compass, 13. doi:10.1111/gec3.12464. Google Scholar
- 2019. New work and value creation in the platform economy. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. Google Scholar
- 2021. August 25: OnlyFans reverses ban on sexually explicit content after wide backlash from its users. Washington Post. Google Scholar
- 2016.
Peer production and cooperation . In J. BauerM. Latzer (Eds.), Handbook on the economics of the internet: 91–119. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar. Google Scholar - 2023. TripAdvisor of healthcare: Opportunities for value creation through patient feedback platforms. Technovation, 121: 102625. Google Scholar
- 2020. Technoscience rent: Toward a theory of rentiership for technoscientific capitalism. Science, Technology & Human Values, 45: 3–33. Google Scholar
- 2020. Organizing actor engagement: A platform perspective. Journal of Business Research, 118: 74–85. Google Scholar
- 2010. Open platform strategies and innovation: Granting access vs. devolving control. Management Science, 56: 1849–1872. Google Scholar
- 2015. Unpaid crowd complementors: The platform network effect mirage. Strategic Management Journal, 36: 1761–1777. Google Scholar
- 2022. Stakeholder governance: Solving the collective action problems in joint value creation. Academy of Management Review, 47: 214–236.Link , Google Scholar
- 2020. Pornography, trans visibility, and the demise of Tumblr. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 7: 240–254. Google Scholar
- 2023. Generative AI at work. Working paper no. w31161, National Bureau of Economic Research, Washington, DC. Google Scholar
- 2014. The second machine age: Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. New York: WW Norton & Company. Google Scholar
- 2023. Metaverse: Threat or opportunity for our social world? In understanding metaverse on sociological context. Journal of Metaverse, 3: 28–33. Google Scholar
- 2023. October 5: Musk is nearly done destroying what made Twitter Twitter. Washington Post. Google Scholar
- 2006. The changing nature of work and organizations: Implications for human resource management. Human Resource Management Review, 16: 86–94. Google Scholar
- 2021. The society of algorithms. Annual Review of Sociology, 47: 213–237. Google Scholar
- 2017. The taking economy: Uber, information, and power. Columbia Law Review, 117: 1623. Google Scholar
- 2024. The making of the “good bad” job: How algorithmic management manufactures consent through confined choices. Administrative Science Quarterly, 69: 458–514. Google Scholar
- 2022. Expanding the locus of resistance: Understanding the co-constitution of control and resistance in the gig economy. Organization Science, 33: 38–58. Google Scholar
- 2022. The evolving nature of open innovation governance: A study of a digital platform development in collaboration with a big science centre. Technovation, 116: 102370. Google Scholar
- 2024. Reddit Inc. employees and unpaid content moderators. Statista. Google Scholar
- 2021. Competing in digital markets: A platform-based perspective. Academy of Management Perspectives, 35: 265–291.Link , Google Scholar
- 2013. Platform competition: Strategic trade-offs in platform markets. Strategic Management Journal, 34: 1331–1350. Google Scholar
- 1962. Strategy and structure. Boston: MIT Press. Google Scholar
- 2022. Governance and design of digital platforms: A review and future research directions on metaorganizations. Journal of Management, 48: 147–184. Google Scholar
- 2022. Platform governance design in platform ecosystems: Implications for complementors’ multihoming decision. Journal of Management, 48: 630–656. Google Scholar
- 2021. Decentralized governance of digital platforms. Journal of Management, 47: 1305–1337. Google Scholar
- 2020. Rentier capitalism: Who owns the economy, and who pays for it? Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Google Scholar
- 2021. Class, assets and work in rentier capitalism. Historical Materialism, 29: 3–28. Google Scholar
- 2022. Platform power and regulatory politics: Polanyi for the twenty-first century. New Political Economy, 27: 820–836. Google Scholar
- 1937. The nature of the firm. Economica, 4: 386–405. Google Scholar
- 2021. Algorithmic censorship by social platforms: Power and resistance. Philosophy & Technology, 34: 739–766. Google Scholar
- 2017.
Management as a practice of power . In A. WilkinsonS. J. ArmstrongM. Lounsbury (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of management: 367–385. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar - 2012. Rethinking power in organizations, institutions, and markets: Classical perspectives, current research, and the future agenda. In D. CourpassonD. GolsorkhiJ. J. Sallaz (Eds.), Rethinking power in organizations, institutions, and markets: 1–20. Leeds, U.K.: Emerald. Google Scholar
- 2022. Rentier capitalism in question. Human Geographies, 15: 287–289. Google Scholar
- 2018. The limits of transparency: Data brokers and commodification. New Media & Society, 20: 88–104. Google Scholar
- 2020. Working for an algorithm: Power asymmetries and agency in online work settings. Administrative Science Quarterly, 65: 644–676. Google Scholar
- 2020. Guidepost: The evolution of research on industry platforms. Academy of Management Discoveries, 8: 7–14. Google Scholar
- 2021. Platform-dependent entrepreneurs: Power asymmetries, risks, and strategies in the platform economy. Academy of Management Perspectives, 35: 584–605.Link , Google Scholar
- 2021. Cultural platform capitalism: Extracting value from cultural asymmetries in RealTech. Social & Cultural Geography, 22: 565–580. Google Scholar
- 2023. To Zoom or not: Diverging responses to privacy and security risks. Journal of Business Research, 161: 113772. Google Scholar
- 2018. The digital platform: A research agenda. Journal of Information Technology, 33: 124–135. Google Scholar
- 2016. The rise of the just-in time workforce: On demand work, crowdwork, and labor protection in the gig economy. Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 37: 461–471. Google Scholar
- 2022. April 11: Etsy sellers launch a week-long strike over increased fees. National Public Radio. Google Scholar
- 2019. Build it break it fix it for dialogue safety: Robustness from adversarial human attack. arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1908.06083. Google Scholar
- 2018. Social media celebrities and neoliberal body politics in China. Working paper no. 91, KFG Working Paper Series, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Google Scholar
- 2023. January 23: The enshittification of TikTok. Wired. Google Scholar
- 2017. (Not) getting paid to do what you love. New Haven, CT: Yale Press. Google Scholar
- 2020. Mediated grassroots collective action: Negotiating barriers of digital activism. Information Communication and Society, 23: 1821–1837. Google Scholar
- 1982. Rules of sociological method. New York: Free Press. Google Scholar
- 2022. The digital repression of social movements, protest, and activism: A synthetic review. Science Advances, 8: eabl8198. Google Scholar
- 2016. Peer-to-peer markets. Annual Review of Economics, 8: 615–635. Google Scholar
- 2020. Contesting algorithms: Restoring the public interest in content filtering by artificial intelligence. Big Data & Society, 7. doi:10.1177/2053951720932296. Google Scholar
- 1962. Power-dependence relations. American Sociological Review, 27: 31–41. Google Scholar
- 2022. The engagement of complementors and the role of platform boundary resources in e-commerce platform ecosystems. Information Systems Frontiers, 24: 2007–2025. Google Scholar
- 2021. A digital room of their own: Chilean students struggling against patriarchy in digital sites. Feminist Media Studies, 21: 281–297. Google Scholar
- 2017. Open collaborative innovation and digital platforms. Production Planning and Control, 28: 1344–1353. Google Scholar
- 2023. Entering non-platformized sectors: The co-evolution of legitimacy debates and platform business models in digital health care. Technovation, 121: 102597. Google Scholar
- 2018. Algorithmic affordances for productive resistance. Big Data & Society, 5. doi:10.1177/2053951718771399. Google Scholar
- 2021.
Religion, new media, and digital culture . In J. Barton (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of religion: 1–10. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar - 2017. Owned: Property, privacy, and the new digital serfdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
- 2022. Life, the metaverse and everything: An overview of privacy, ethics, and governance in Metaverse. In 2022 IEEE 42nd international conference on distributed computing systems workshops (ICDCSW): 272–277. IEEE. Retrieved from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=9951378&casa_token=BjnvOQKuukYAAAAA:ak-wrMoaUfWLV5WH0ZEwAsMBpnuYdBEwBOIyD1q2WrnyOULE9l25yT-57e7FN93q8VGz99clo_Ni Google Scholar
- 2021. Fissures in algorithmic power: Platforms, code, and contestation. Cultural Studies, 35: 814–832. Google Scholar
- 2022. Automated landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation. Environment and Planning A. Economy and Space, 54: 160–181. Google Scholar
- 2022.
The dehumanising consequences of gamification: Recognising coercion and exploitation in gamified systems . In S. FitzpatrickT. Marsh (Eds.), Handbook of research on cross-disciplinary uses of gamification in organizations: 398–417. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Google Scholar - 2007. Contesting the corporation: Struggle, power and resistance in organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
- 2014. Power in management and organization science. Academy of Management Annals, 8: 237–298.Link , Google Scholar
- 2009. Decentralization in Wikipedia governance. Journal of Management Information Systems, 26: 49–72. Google Scholar
- 1976. The history of sexuality: An introduction. New York: Vintage. Google Scholar
- 1983.
The subject and power . In H. DreyfusP. Rabinow (Eds.), Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics: 208–226. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar - 1998. The history of sexuality: The will to knowledge. London: Penguin. Google Scholar
- 2021. The rise of online platforms and the triumph of the corporation. Sociologica, 14: 101–113. Google Scholar
- 2005. The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Macmillan. Google Scholar
- 2023. June 23: Reddit users bombard site with John Oliver pictures in latest protest. CNN. Google Scholar
- 2024. Star entrepreneurs on digital platforms. Journal of Business Venturing, 39: 106347. Google Scholar
- 2019. Labour process theory and the gig economy. Human Relations, 72: 1039–1056. Google Scholar
- 2003. Power after Lukes: A review of the literature. Brighton, U.K.: Institute of Development Studies. Google Scholar
- 2014. Bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms: Toward an integrative framework. Research Policy, 43: 1239–1249. Google Scholar
- 2022. Digital platforms and ecosystems: Remarks on the dominant organizational forms of the digital age. Innovation, 24: 110–124. Google Scholar
- 2021. Über-alienated: Powerless and alone in the gig economy. Work and Occupations, 48: 399–431. Google Scholar
- 2023. Generative language models and automated influence operations. arXiv. Google Scholar
- 2019. “Good icing can’t change an average cake”: Gameful experience, work relationships and the automation of behavioural management. Digital Cult & Soc, 5: 61–82. Google Scholar
- 2010. Dyads in organizational research: Conceptual issues and multilevel analyses. Organizational Research Methods, 14: 456–483. Google Scholar
- 2019a. What is platform governance? Information Communication and Society, 22: 854–871. Google Scholar
- 2019b. The platform governance triangle: Conceptualizing the informal regulation of online content. Internet Policy Review, 8: 1–22. Google Scholar
- 2020. Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. Big Data & Society, 7: 5. Google Scholar
- 2018. Bullshit jobs. E mploi, 131–133. Google Scholar
- 2018. Platforms and hyper-choice on the World Wide Web. Big Data & Society, 5. doi:10.1177/2053951718765878. Google Scholar
- 2024. August 24: Google’s antitrust defeat opens the door to lawsuit from Yelp. New York Times. Google Scholar
- 2022. Barriers to academic data science research in the new realm of algorithmic behaviour modification by digital platforms. Nature Machine Intelligence, 4: 323–330. Google Scholar
- 2012. Meta‐organization design: Rethinking design in interorganizational and community contexts. Strategic Management Journal, 33: 571–586. Google Scholar
- 2023. How digital platforms organize immaturity: A sociosymbolic framework of platform power. Business Ethics Quarterly, 33: 1–33. Google Scholar
- 2006. The limits to capital. London: Verso Books. Google Scholar
- 2010. The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism. London: Profile. Google Scholar
- 2023. Digital entrepreneurship and emancipation: Exploring the nexus in a conflict zone. International Journal of Emerging Markets, 18: 4170–4190. Google Scholar
- 2019.
Digital platforms as means of social interaction . In A. Rocha (Ed.), Digital science, vol. 850: 417–425. New York: Springer International Publishing. Google Scholar - 1958. The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar
- 2022. Relations between actors in digital platform ecosystems: A literature review. In Proceedings of 30th European conference on information systems. Timişoara, Romania: ECIS Publishing. Google Scholar
- 2022. The big techification of everything. Science as culture, 31: 59–71. Google Scholar
- 2019. A typology of crowdwork platforms. Work, Employment and Society, 33: 21–38. Google Scholar
- 2017. Governance practices in platform ecosystems. Information Systems Research, 28: 563–584. Google Scholar
- 2013. Essays concerning the entry and survival strategies of entrepreneurial firms: A transaction perspective. Doctoral dissertation, Colorado, University of Colorado—Boulder. Google Scholar
- 2015. Contagion entrepreneurship: Institutional support, strategic incoherence, and the social costs of over‐entry. Journal of Small Business Management, 53: 5–29. Google Scholar
- 2022. Middle Eastern women influencers’ interdependent/independent subjectification on Tiktok. Information Communication and Society, 25: 734–751. Google Scholar
- 2022. Power dynamics in software platform ecosystems. Information Systems Journal, 32: 310–343. Google Scholar
- 2018. Toward a theory of ecosystems. Strategic Management Journal, 39: 2255–2276. Google Scholar
- 2021. Evaluating the effectiveness of deplatforming as a moderation strategy. Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, 5: 1–30. Google Scholar
- 2009. Precarious work, insecure workers: Employment relations in transition. American Sociological Review, 74: 1–22. Google Scholar
- 2013. Globalization and precarious work. Contemporary Sociology, 42: 700–706. Google Scholar
- 2017.
Probing precarious work: Theory, research, and politics . In A. L. KallebergS. P. Vallas (Eds.), Precarious work: 1–30. Bingley, U.K.: Emerald. Google Scholar - 2020. Information exchange architecture for collaborative industrial ecosystem. Information Systems Frontiers, 22: 655–670. Google Scholar
- 2021. Regulated dependence: Platform workers’ responses to new forms of organizing. Journal of Management Studies, 58: 1070–1106. Google Scholar
- 2023. Bounded ownership: Lessons learned from online platforms in creating inclusive goods. Social Media + Society, 9. doi:10.1177/20563051231175624. Google Scholar
- 2020. Algorithms at work: The new contested terrain of control. Academy of Management Annals, 14: 366–410.Link , Google Scholar
- 2021. The platform economy matures: Measuring pervasiveness and exploring power. Socio-Economic Review, 19: 1451–1483. Google Scholar
- 2018. Gigged: The end of the job and the future of work. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Google Scholar
- 2018. Sources of tech platform power. Georgetown Law Techn Rev, 2: 325–334. Google Scholar
- 2022. Mutualism and the dynamics of new platform creation. Strategic Management Journal, 43: 476–506. Google Scholar
- 2018. Regulatory governance: Rules, resistance, and responsibility. Contemporary Politics, 24: 497–506. Google Scholar
- 2021. The rise of education rentiers: Digital platforms, digital data and rents. Learning, Media and Technology, 46: 320–332. Google Scholar
- 2010. Adhocratic governance in the Internet age: A case of Wikipedia. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 7: 263–283. Google Scholar
- 2018. The future of workers: Contingent forms of labor contracting in the platform economy. Psychosociological Issues in Human Resource Management, 6: 172–177. Google Scholar
- 2022. Platform ecosystems as meta-organizations: Implications for platform strategies. Strategic Management Journal, 43: 405–424. Google Scholar
- 2017. Micro-entrepreneurs, dependent contractors, and instaserfs: Understanding online labor platform workforces. Academy of Management Perspectives, 31: 183–200.Link , Google Scholar
- 2017. Platform capitalism: The intermediation and capitalization of digital economic circulation. Finance and Society, 3: 11–31. Google Scholar
- 2018. Job insecurity and the changing workplace: Recent developments and the future trends in job insecurity research. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5: 335–359. Google Scholar
- 2022. Affordances, movement dynamics, and a centralized digital communication platform in a networked movement. Information, Communication & Society, 25: 1699–1716. Google Scholar
- 2023. June 20: Thousands of Reddit communities stay dark as app policy protest continues. New York Times. Google Scholar
- 2023. Colonising the narrative space: Unliveable lives, unseeable struggles and the necropolitical governance of digital populations. Information Communication and Society, 26: 2398–2418. Google Scholar
- 2020. Drug abuse and the internet: Evidence from craigslist. Management Science, 66: 2040–2049. Google Scholar
- 2023. Platform governance and sociological participation. Journal of Chinese Sociology, 10: 3. Google Scholar
- 2024. May 31: E-Commerce to hit $6.8 trillion by 2028. Forbes. Google Scholar
- 1974. Power: A radical view. London: Macmillan. Google Scholar
- 2024. The dark side of powerful platform owners: Aspiration adaptations of digital firms. Academy of Management Perspectives. Forthcoming. Google Scholar
- 2021. Business model innovation and experimentation in transforming economies: ByteDance and TikTok. Management and Organization Review, 17: 382–388. Google Scholar
- 2017. Twitter-based detection of illegal online sale of prescription opioids. American Journal of Public Health, 107: 1910–1915. Google Scholar
- 2004. “Two’s company, three’s a crowd?” Triads in cooperative-competitive networks. Academy of Management Journal, 47: 918–927.Abstract , Google Scholar
- 2017. Towards deep learning models resistant to adversarial attacks. arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1706.06083 Google Scholar
- 2017. Democratising platform governance in the sharing economy: An analytical framework. Journal of Cleaner Production, 166: 1395–1406. Google Scholar
- 2024. The sociology of power. London: Taylor & Francis. Google Scholar
- 2021.
A serf on Google’s farm . In Media capture: How money, digital platforms, and governments control the news: 83–91. New York: Columbia University Press. Google Scholar - 1998. The utilization of contingent work, knowledge creation, and competitive advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23: 680–697.Link , Google Scholar
- 2019. Institutional voids and the development of women’s digital entrepreneurship. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 146: 912–922. Google Scholar
- 2017. Networks, platforms, and strategy: Emerging views and next steps. Strategic Management Journal, 38: 141–160. Google Scholar
- 2021. Multi-sided platforms as new organizational forms. Academy of Management Perspectives, 35: 566–583.Link , Google Scholar
- 2022. Enhanced self-regulation: The case of Facebook’s content governance. New Media & Society, 24: 2227–2251. Google Scholar
- 2023. Changing nature of work and the gig economy: Theory and debate. FIIB Business Review, 12: 227–237. Google Scholar
- 2024. Twitter files’ Matt Taibbi. The New Republic, 2: 13–22. Google Scholar
- 2019. Digitalization in industry: Between domination and emancipation. Berlin, Germany: Springer Nature. Google Scholar
- 2015. Operations of capital. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114: 1–9. Google Scholar
- 2017. On the multiple frontiers of extraction: Excavating contemporary capitalism. Cultural Studies, 31: 185–240. Google Scholar
- 2019. Protecting their digital assets: The use of formal & informal appropriability strategies by App developers. Research Policy, 48: 103738. Google Scholar
- 2023. How does competition influence innovative effort within a platform-based ecosystem? Contrasting paid and unpaid contributors. Research Policy, 52: 104790. Google Scholar
- 2021. Algorithmic management of work on online labor platforms: When matching meets control. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 45: 1999–2022. Google Scholar
- 2018. Towards homo digitalis. Sustainability, 10: 415. Google Scholar
- 2018. The creativity hoax: Precarious work in the gig economy. London: Anthem Press. Google Scholar
- 2009. May 19: The brave new world of slacktivism. Foreign Policy. Google Scholar
- 2016.
The net delusion: How not to liberate the world . In Democracy: A reader: 436–440. New York: Columbia University Press. Google Scholar - 2008. Excerpts from digital citizenship: The internet, society, and participation. Cambridge: MIT Press. Google Scholar
- 2023. October 19: Jon Stewart’s show on Apple is ending. New York Times. Google Scholar
- 2021. Humans and technology: Forms of conjoined agency in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 46: 552–571.Link , Google Scholar
- 2021. On the costs of digital entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Research, 125: 520–532. Google Scholar
- 2020. Balancing the tradeoff between profit and fairness in rideshare platforms during high-demand hours. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34: 2210–2217. Google Scholar
- 2022. Algorithms, data, and platforms: The diverse challenges of governing AI. Journal of European Public Policy, 29: 1753–1778. Google Scholar
- 2023. October 30: Expedia’s Barry Diller threatened revolt over ads on Google search. Bloomberg. Google Scholar
- 2015.
Money talks: The enclosure of mobile payments . In R. O’Dwyer (Ed.), MoneyLab reader: An intervention in digital economy: 230–244. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Google Scholar - 2018. Disruption in platform‐based ecosystems. Journal of Management Studies, 55: 1203–1241. Google Scholar
- 2023. Fugazi regulation as a new mode of regulation under the accumulation regime of digital capitalism. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.4527577. Google Scholar
- 2016. Platform revolution. New York: Norton & Co. Google Scholar
- 2020. The platform conjuncture. Sociologica, 14: 73–99. Google Scholar
- 2022. Multisided platform business model. Business Model Analyst. Google Scholar
- 2016. The end of ownership: Personal property in the digital economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar
- 1981. Power in organizations. Pensacola, FL: Ballinger Pub. Google Scholar
- 1992. Understanding power in organizations. California Management Review, 34: 29–50. Google Scholar
- 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
- 2020. The coevolution of platform dominance and governance strategies. Academy of Management Discoveries, 6: 488–513. Google Scholar
- 2015. The tumbleweed society: Working and caring in an age of insecurity. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
- 2022. At least I’m my own boss! Explaining consent, coercion and resistance in platform work. Work, Employment and Society, 36: 391–406. Google Scholar
- 2024. Taming platform power: Taking accountability into account in the management of platforms. Academy of Management Annals, 18: 251–294.Link , Google Scholar
- 2023. The experimental hand: How platform-based experimentation reconfigures worker autonomy. Academy of Management Journal, 66: 1803–1830.Link , Google Scholar
- 2019. The rise of the platform business model and the transformation of twenty-first-century capitalism. Politics & Society, 47: 177–204. Google Scholar
- 2019. Next generation digital platforms: Toward human-AI hybrids. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 43: iii–ix. Google Scholar
- 2020. Grassroots resistance to digital platforms and relational business model design. Strategy Science, 5: 271–291. Google Scholar
- 2017. Demand heterogeneity in platform markets: Implications for complementors. Organization Science, 29: 304–322. Google Scholar
- 2022. On top of the game? The double‐edged sword of incorporating social features into freemium products. Strategic Management Journal, 43: 1182–1207. Google Scholar
- 2021. Platform competition: A systematic and interdisciplinary review of the literature. Journal of Management, 47: 1528–1563. Google Scholar
- 1987. Citizenship, social theory, and social change. Theory and Society, 16: 363–399. Google Scholar
- 2003. Platform competition in two-sided markets. Journal of the European Economic Association, 4: 990–1029. Google Scholar
- 2016. Employment rights in the platform economy: Getting back to basics. Harvard Law & Policy Review, 10: 479. Google Scholar
- 2020. Deplatforming: Following extreme Internet celebrities to Telegram and alternative social media. European Journal of Communication, 35: 213–229. Google Scholar
- 2020. The internet of landlords: Digital platforms and new mechanisms of rentier capitalism. Antipode, 52: 562–580. Google Scholar
- 2021. Transformation of business technologies into digital platforms and evaluation of the effectiveness of their application. International conference on quality management, transport and information security: 888–892. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. Google Scholar
- 2021. Multi-sided platforms and markets: A survey of the theoretical literature. Journal of Economic Surveys, 35: 452–487. Google Scholar
- 2016. Debating the sharing economy. Journal of Self-governance and Management Economics, 4: 7–22. Google Scholar
- 2020. After the gig: How the sharing economy got hijacked and how to win it back. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Google Scholar
- 2017. The “sharing” economy: Labor, inequality, and social connection on for‐profit platforms. Sociology Compass, 11: e12493. Google Scholar
- 2016. Design and governance of platform ecosystems: Key concepts and issues for future research, Research paper 76, Twenty-fourth conference on information systems (ECIS): 12–15, Istanbul, Turkey. Google Scholar
- 2018. Multi-layer governance in platform ecosystems of established companies. Abstract. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2018. doi:10.5465/AMBPP.2018.16. Google Scholar
- 2021. Between mutuality, autonomy and domination: Rethinking digital platforms as contested relational structures. Socio-Economic Review, 19: 1217–1243. Google Scholar
- 2017. Triads: A review and analytical framework. Marketing Theory, 17: 395–414. Google Scholar
- 1950. The sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press. Google Scholar
- 2023. Borderline practices on Douyin/TikTok: Content transfer and algorithmic manipulation. Media Culture & Society, 45: 1534–1549. Google Scholar
- 2019. Online manipulation: Hidden influences in a digital world. Geo. L. Tech. Rev, 4: 1. Google Scholar
- 2018. The sharing economy and digital platforms: A review and research agenda. International Journal of Information Management, 43: 328–341. Google Scholar
- 2022. The demise of #NSFW: Contested platform governance and Tumblr’s 2018 adult content ban. New Media & Society, 24: 2311–2331. Google Scholar
- 2018. Understanding platform business models: A mixed methods study of marketplaces. European Management Journal, 36: 319–329. Google Scholar
- 2014. The people’s platform: Taking back power and culture in the digital age. Toronto, Canada: Random House Canada. Google Scholar
- 2022. Platform Governance. American Economic Journal, 14: 213–254. Google Scholar
- 2021. The future of digital platforms: Conditions of platform overthrow. Creativity and Innovation Management, 30: 80–95. Google Scholar
- 2019. The ethics of gamification in a marketing context. Journal of Business Ethics, 155: 597–609. Google Scholar
- 2021. Sex, power and platform governance. Porn Studies, 8: 381–393. Google Scholar
- 2013. Platform ecosystems. Aligning architecture, governance, and strategy. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Google Scholar
- 2020. Complex control and the governmentality of digital platforms. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 2: 6. Google Scholar
- 2019. Entrepreneurial action, creativity, & judgment in the age of artificial intelligence. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 11: e00126. Google Scholar
- 2023. Are the futures computable? act uncertainty and artificial intelligence. Academy of Management Review. Forthcoming. Google Scholar
- 2024. Do androids dream of entrepreneurial possibilities? Academy of Management Review. Forthcoming. Google Scholar
- 2020. The trainer, the verifier, the imitator: Three ways in which human platform workers support artificial intelligence. Big Data & Society, 7. doi:10.1177/2053951720919776. Google Scholar
- 2023. Ethical scaling for content moderation: Extreme speech and the (in) significance of artificial intelligence. Big Data & Society, 10. doi:10.1177/20539517231172424. Google Scholar
- 2023. Digital labour platforms and neoliberal governmentality: The case of platform workers in Turkey. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 43: 142–155. Google Scholar
- 2012. Dualism, job polarization, and the social construction of precarious work. Work and Occupations, 39: 331–353. Google Scholar
- 2020. What do platforms do? Understanding the gig economy. Annual Review of Sociology, 46: 273–294. Google Scholar
- 2019. Platform capitalism: What’s at stake for workers? New Labor Forum, 28: 48–59. Google Scholar
- 2017. Platform business: From resources to relationships. NIM Marketing Intelligence Review, 9: 24–29. Google Scholar
- 2013. “You have one identity:” Performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn. Media Culture & Society, 35: 199–215. Google Scholar
- 2021. Deplatformization and the governance of the platform ecosystem. New Media & Society, 25: 3438–3454. Google Scholar
- 2019. Reframing platform power. Internet Policy Review, 8: 1–18. Google Scholar
- 2017. Platform labor: On the gendered and racialized exploitation of low-income service work in the “on-demand” economy. Communicatio Socialis, 20: 898–914. Google Scholar
- 2022. Gamification and work games: Examining consent and resistance among Uber drivers. New Media & Society, 24: 866–886. Google Scholar
- 2020. Decentralized vs. distributed organization: Blockchain, machine learning and the future of the digital platform. Organization Theory, 1. doi:10.1177/2631787720977052. Google Scholar
- 2021. January 29: Keith Gill drove the GameStop Reddit mania. Wall Street Journal. Google Scholar
- 2023. The cold-start problem in nascent AI strategy. Journal of Business Research, 168: 114236. Google Scholar
- 2020. Mob censorship: Online harassment of US journalists in times of digital hate and populism. Digital Journalism, 8: 1030–1046. Google Scholar
- 2017. Unraveling platform strategies: A review from an organizational ambidexterity perspective. Sustainability, 9: 734. Google Scholar
- 2023. The more they know: Using transparent online communication to combat fake online reviews. Business Horizons, 66: 753–764. Google Scholar
- 2018. Gamification: What it is, and how to fight it. Sociological Review, 66: 542–558. Google Scholar
- 2017. Mining twitter feeds for software user requirements. Paper presented in 2017 IEEE 25th international requirements engineering conference: 1–10. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. Google Scholar
- 1975. Markets and hierarchies: Analysis and antitrust implications: A study in the economics of internal organization. Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois. Google Scholar
- 1981. The economics of organization: The transaction cost approach. American Journal of Sociology, 87: 548–577. Google Scholar
- 1996. The mechanisms of governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
- 2023. Platform owner entry into complementor spaces under different governance modes. Journal of Management, 49: 1766–1800. Google Scholar
- 2022. Toward emancipation through a regenerative digital economy. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 41: 111–112. Google Scholar
- 2022. From content moderation to visibility moderation: A case study of platform governance on TikTok. Policy and Internet, 14: 79–95. Google Scholar
- 2022. Surveillance capitalism or democracy? The death match of institutional orders and the politics of knowledge in our information civilization. Organization Theory, 3. doi:10.1177/26317877221129290. Google Scholar