The Salience of Organizational Form in a "Platform Economy"

The 'platform' or 'sharing economy' has been contested almost from the beginning of Uber's aggressive “disruption” of traditional markets. The struggle over terminology such as 'peer' and then 'sharing' economy is not superficial: I argue that the explicit contestation over platform economies goes to the heart of political economic questions, in short, how the economy should be organized.

Internet platforms create new “law” by virtue of the organizational structures they pioneer. This process is made salient by the fact that critics of monopoly-seeking app corporations have called Uber and AirBnB's political economy “platform capitalism” and have started articulating counter-models to this way of value creation and distribution. The focus of the critique is on ownership – a neglected dimension of organizational form. My hypothesis is that the 'disruptive' entrepreneurship of the Silicon Valley 'sharing economy' threatened to redefine already existing peer economies with cooperative ethos (FOSS, Wikipedia etc.). This threat has heightened the salience of the moral economies that infuse these forms of organizing labor and distributing ownership.

To understand the controversy around what platform apps really do and are, I argue that we must reinvigorate concepts of organizational form as relevant to moral economies and political economy. Organization scholarship on new forms has focused on the concept of institutional entrepreneurship (DiMaggio 1988). Rao et al. (2000) argue that much of organizational theory ignores the conflict associated with change, and that the process of introducing new organizational forms in fields is essentially political. Yet, their conceptualization of organizational form remains vague and based on Scott's (1995) classical formulation of core and peripheral features. Organizational form is observed at the level of fields or industries – ownership in particular is largely ignored and is perceived as subordinate to goals and performance (Handy et al. 2010; Malani & David 2008).

What is missing from the picture is a political sociological perspective on contemporary struggles over organizational form in relationship with the shape of economies and industries at large – in the style of Roy's narrative about the “corporate revolution” that organized U.S. American industry into large corporations (Roy 1997). Far above the level of individual organizations and even industries, the debates about “platform capitalism” have the scope of struggle over political economy – how should economic exchange and ownership be organized with the technological possibilities we have? Organizational form becomes the vehicle for this debate, as organizations (even if “networked”) are understood as the unit that makes up (market) economies. I suggest that a new conceptualization of organizational form is in order that takes into account ownership and technology, as well as salience and politicization of forms of organizing.