The rapid growth of the platform economy has provoked scholarly discussion of its consequences for the nature of work and employment. We identify four major themes in the literature on platform work ...and the underlying metaphors associated with each. Platforms are seen as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, accelerants of precarity, and chameleons adapting to their environments. Each of these devices has limitations, which leads us to introduce an alternative image of platforms: as permissive potentates that externalize responsibility and control over economic transactions while still exercising concentrated power. As a consequence, platforms represent a distinct type of governance mechanism, different from markets, hierarchies, or networks, and therefore pose a unique set of problems for regulators, workers, and their competitors in the conventional economy. Reflecting the instability of the platform structure, struggles over regulatory regimes are dynamic and difficult to predict, but they are sure to gain in prominence as the platform economy grows.
•Sharing economy platforms have a set of essential affordances for mediating exchanges.•Sharing economy platforms can be discussed and compared in terms of centralization.•The literature is ...preoccupied with centralized, profit-driven platforms like Uber.•Future research must develop a conceptualization of decentralized sharing contexts.•Future research must engage directly with the nature of sharing economy technologies.
Over the last few years the sharing economy has been changing the way that people share and conduct transactions in digital spaces. This research phenomenon has drawn scholars from a large number of disparate fields and disciplines into an emerging research area. Given the variety of perspectives represented, there is a great need to collect and connect what has been done, and to identify some common themes, which will serve as a basis for future discussions on the crucial roles played by digital platforms in the sharing economy. Drawing on a collection of 435 publications on the sharing economy and related terms, we identify some trends in the literature and underlying research interests. Specifically, we organize the literature around the concept of platform mediation, and draw a set of essential affordances of sharing economy technologies from the reviewed literature. We present the notion of platform centralization/decentralization as an effective organizing principle for the variety of perspectives on the sharing economy, and also evaluate scholars' treatment of technology itself. Finally, we identify important gaps in the existing literature on the relationship between digital platforms and sharing economy, and provide directions for future investigations.
This article analyzes deplatformization as an implied governance strategy by major tech companies to detoxify the platform ecosystem of radical content while consolidating their power as designers, ...operators, and governors of that same ecosystem. Deplatformization is different from deplatforming: it entails a systemic effort to push back encroaching radical right-wing platforms to the fringes of the ecosystem by denying them the infrastructural services needed to function online. We identify several deplatformization strategies, using Gab as an example of a platform that survived its relegation and which subsequently tried to build an alternative at the edge of the mainstream ecosystem. Evaluating deplatformization in terms of governance, the question that arises is who is responsible for cleansing the ecosystem: corporations, states, civil society actors, or all three combined? Understanding the implied governance of deplatformization is imperative to assess the higher stakes in future debates concerning Internet governability.
The complexities of platforms are increasingly at odds with the narrow legal and economic concepts in which their governance is grounded. This article aims to analyze platformization through the ...metaphorical lens of a tree to make sense of information ecosystems as hierarchical and interdependent structures. The layered shape of the tree draws attention to the dynamics of power concentration: vertical integration, infrastructuralization, and cross-sectorization. Next, the metaphor helps to revision the current patchwork of European regulatory frameworks, addressing the power asymmetry between citizens and the data-driven systems through which their daily practices are governed. Finally, the platformization tree serves to identify points of intervention that may inform European regulatory bodies and policy-makers to act as agents of change. Taking a holistic approach to platformization, this visual metaphor may inspire a set of principles that reshapes the platform ecosystem in the interest of society and the common good.
Digital microwork consists of remote and highly decontextualized labor that is increasingly governed by algorithms. The anonymity and granularity of such work is likely to cause alienation among ...workers. To date, we know little about how workers reconcile such potential feelings of alienation with their simultaneous commitment to the platform. Based on a longitudinal survey of 460 workers on a large microworking platform and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, we show that (1) alienation is present in digital microwork. However, our study also finds that (2) workers’ commitment to the platform over time may alter their subjective perceptions of alienation. Drawing from qualitative statements, we show (3) how workers perform identity work that might help reconcile feelings of alienation with simultaneous platform commitment. Our findings contribute to solving the paradox of worker commitment to precarious platform labor, which is an issue frequently raised in the digital labor literature.
Riders on the Storm Tassinari, Arianna; Maccarrone, Vincenzo
Work, employment and society,
02/2020, Volume:
34, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In light of the individualisation, dispersal and pervasive monitoring that characterise work in the ‘gig economy’, the development of solidarity among gig workers could be expected to be unlikely. ...However, numerous recent episodes of gig workers’ mobilisation require reconsideration of these assumptions. This article contributes to the debate about potentials and obstacles for solidarity in the changing world of work by showing the processes through which workplace solidarity among gig workers developed in two cases of mobilisation of food delivery platform couriers in the UK and Italy. Through the framework of labour process theory, the article identifies the sources of antagonism in the app-mediated model of work organisation and the factors that facilitated and hindered the consolidation of active solidarity and the emergence of collective action among gig workers. The article emphasises the centrality of workers’ agential practices in overcoming constraints to solidarity and collective action, and the diversity of forms through which solidarity can be expressed in hostile work contexts.
Since the 2010s, two worldwide trends have reshaped the urban housing system and induced drastic neighborhood change: the financialization of rental housing and the rise of the platform economy. In ...China, with continued investment from speculative financial institutions, platform companies aggressively acquired rental houses from individual landlords to develop a platform-based housing rental economy. How does this new rental economy affect housing supply, rents and inequality? This research answers this question by taking Chengdu, China as a case study. A mixed method approach of big data analytics, hedonic pricing model, and field investigations were used to unpack: (a) the pattern of platform houses distribution and its indication of spatial strategies of the financialized platform economy to grab land rent; (b) the effect of such new housing rental economy on housing rents; (c) the effect of the degree of financialization on platform houses' rental prices. The results inform the debate on the disrupt effect of platform economy and housing financialization on equitable urban development, particularly the heterogeneity among cities and countries. This paper contributes to understanding financial investors' glocalization strategy and the state's territorialization strategy as two crucial factors for the variegation of rental housing financialization.
•Houses with small living room and more bedrooms that can generate more rent.•Platform companies tend to choose houses nearby public transport services.•High concentration of platform houses increases rental price of surrounding normal houses.•Degree of financialization significantly increases the price premiums of platform houses.
The platform economy has become a new engine and leading force for China’s economic development. With the rapid development of super internet platforms, this field has drawn growing attention from ...attention of anti-monopoly authorities. The technical attributes and business characteristics of the platform economy endow those platforms with a “natural” monopoly advantage, and the quasi-public attributes of the internet platforms require anti-monopoly authorities to bear more monopoly governance responsibilities. This paper analyzes the difficulties in monopoly governance of the platform economy from the perspectives of anti-monopoly legislation, government regulation and global monopoly governance, and proposes several solutions and suggestions to improve the effectiveness of anti-monopoly governance and promote healthy development of the digital economic ecology. The solutions and suggestions include: focusing on building up technologybased regulatory capabilities, accelerating the legislation on data protection of data, and developing an anti-monopoly system based on the principle of giving priority to innovation.
Good Gig, Bad Gig Wood, Alex J; Graham, Mark; Lehdonvirta, Vili ...
Work, employment and society,
02/2019, Volume:
33, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article evaluates the job quality of work in the remote gig economy. Such work consists of the remote provision of a wide variety of digital services mediated by online labour platforms. ...Focusing on workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the article draws on semi-structured interviews in six countries (N = 107) and a cross-regional survey (N = 679) to detail the manner in which remote gig work is shaped by platform-based algorithmic control. Despite varying country contexts and types of work, we show that algorithmic control is central to the operation of online labour platforms. Algorithmic management techniques tend to offer workers high levels of flexibility, autonomy, task variety and complexity. However, these mechanisms of control can also result in low pay, social isolation, working unsocial and irregular hours, overwork, sleep deprivation and exhaustion.
In the first of two reports on FinTech, I review definitions, roots and taxonomies of FinTech, survey studies charting FinTech development, and theoretical approaches to FinTech. Emerging empirical ...research shows a dynamic growth of FinTech characterized by heterogeneity and diversity. Ecosystems, financial ecologies, and digital platform economies are the most popular approaches to FinTech, and I argue that they can be used fruitfully in combination with more established concepts, such as networks and agglomeration. Overall, I show that FinTech research is in a state of flux concerning concepts and empirics, and highlight the potential of geography to tame the beast.
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