Platform Architectures. The Structuration of Platform Companies on the Internet
28 Pages Posted: 30 Jan 2022
Date Written: January 26, 2022
Abstract
Today’s internet is shaped largely by privately operated platforms of various kinds. This paper asks how the various commercially operated communication, market, consump-tion and service platforms can be grasped as a distinct organizational form of enterprise. To this end, we make a basic distinction between (1) the platform-operating companies as organizing and structuring cores whose goal is to run a profitable business, and (2) the platforms belonging to these companies as more or less extensive, rule-based and strongly technically mediated social action spaces. While platform companies are essen-tially organizations in an almost archetypical sense, the internet platforms they operate constitute socio-technically structured social, market, consumption or service spaces in which social actors interact on the basis of detailed and technically framed rules, albeit, at the same time, in a varied and idiosyncratic manner. The thesis of this paper is that the coordination, control and exploitation mechanisms characteristic of the platform archi-tectures are characterized by a strong hierarchical orientation in which elements of co-optation and the orchestrated participation of users are embedded. In this hybrid constel-lation, the platform companies have a high degree of structure-giving, rule-setting and controlling power—in addition to exclusive access to the raw data material generated there. While this power may manifest, at times, as rigid control, direct coercion or en-forceable accountability, for the majority of rule-obeying users it unfolds nearly imper-ceptibly and largely silently beneath the surface of a (supposed) openness that likewise characterizes the platforms as technically mediated spaces for social and economic ex-change.
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