What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy

TLDR

The rapid growth of the platform economy has sparked scholarly debate about its impact on work and employment, with platforms portrayed as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, precarity accelerators, and adaptive chameleons. The study identifies four major themes and their associated metaphors in the literature on platform work. The authors propose a new image of platforms as permissive potentates that externalize responsibility while retaining power, arguing that this distinct governance model creates unique regulatory, worker, and competitive challenges that will become increasingly prominent as the platform economy expands.

Abstract

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.