Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
Automotive Acoustics Conference 2025

Call for Papers - Deadline: 01/13/2025. 

We would like to invite you to submit your proposals for a presentation and join us as we explore new practices in sustainable noise control. We are looking forward to your insights on innovative, eco-friendly, and smart ways to shape the future of automotive acoustics.
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Read chapter Read first chapter

2024 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. A Critical Perspective on the Increasing Power of Digital Platforms Through the Lens of Conjunctural Geographies

Author : Sina Hardaker

Published in: Geographies of the Platform Economy

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Drawing on expert interviews and bridging the disciplinary divide between retail studies, economic geography, and platform literature, this chapter critically assesses the changing role of digital platforms such as Amazon as market makers and gatekeepers in the retailing sector. To discuss digital platforms’ increasing power, this chapter uses the lens of “conjunctural geographies”, where digital platforms simultaneously embed and disembed themselves from the space-times they intermediate. Using a strategic deployment of conjunctural geographies, they continue to permanently shape the retail landscape on a large scale, operating rather detached from retailers involved, therewith avoiding accountabilities. Yet, the study expands the understanding of conjunctural geographies by arguing that digital platforms intentionally wish to embed temporarily. They do so on an allegedly more local level in order to increase their reach and their legitimacy, using inter alia institutions, municipalities, and agencies as intermediaries who act more or less on behalf of the platform.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe




 

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
previous chapter VCs, Technology Firms, and Governance: Examining the Tentacles of Digital Growth
next chapter Digital Platforms and Labour Agency in the Logistics Sector: The Role of Production Network Knowledge
Footnotes
1
Building on his concept of conjunctural geographies, Graham (2020) argues that this understanding simultaneously leads to the vulnerability of digital platforms, as “[T]he ephemeral nature of platforms means we can avoid them, circumvent them and replicate them; their material nature suggests points of regulation and resistance”. Graham differentiates between three broad strategies (regulate, replicate, and resist) to hold platforms to account, which will not be pursued further in the context of this chapter.
 
2
The German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) serves as the collective voice of Germany’s commercial, industrial, and service sectors. It encompasses 79 industry and commerce chambers (IHKs), representing several million businesses ranging from small kiosks to large corporate entities.
 
3
As the leading organization of the German retail sector, the HDE is the legitimate voice of the industry towards politics at the federal and EU level, as well as towards other economic sectors, the media, and the public. In this, it can rely on the broad support of state and regional associations as well as trade associations.
 
4
Due to their diverse nature, different approaches exist to categorize platform models: In general, digital platforms can be divided into B2C (business to consumer, e.g. Amazon and Meta), B2B (business to business, e.g. Amazon Web Services, Magento, and Shopify), and C2C (consumer to consumer; e.g. Kleinanzeigen, Gumtree, and Vinted).
 
5
Embeddedness, which is not defined by Graham (2020) in more detail, generally refers to the notion that economic activities are grounded in social, cultural, and political systems (Granovetter 1985; Polanyi 1957; 2001). Although first developed by sociologists, economic geographers have actively used the concept to study how spatially and historically situated non-economic factors influence the development of firms, industries, and regions. More recently, research on the digital platform economy has started to focus on embeddedness aspects (e.g. Grabher and König 2020; Hardaker 2021). Yet, difficulties remain in pinpointing digital platforms’ embeddedness. Firstly, we are still often unaware of how platforms exert influence on our lives, inter alia through the configuration of new commodities, thereby turning the often-unassuming consumers into the products themselves (Hardaker 2021). Secondly, digital platforms often operate in secrecy, with no office door to knock at and with many “institutional configurations and regulatory regimes” being “in the making” (Grabher and König 2020, p. 110).
 
Literature
Barns S (2019) Negotiating the platform pivot: from participatory digital ecosystems to infrastructures of everyday life. Geogr Compass 13(9):e12464CrossRef
Bissell D (2020) Affective platform urbanism: changing habits of on-demand consumption. Geoforum 115:102–110CrossRef
BMWi (2020). Altmaier: Innenstädte sollen wieder Lieblingsplätze werden. 20 Oct 2020
Calvano E, Polo M (2021) Market power, competition and innovation in digital markets: a survey. Inf Econ Policy 54:100853CrossRef
Celata F, Capineri C, Romano A (2020) A room with a (re)view. Short-term rentals, digital reputation and the uneven spatiality of platform-mediated tourism. Geoforum 112:129–138CrossRef
Chen JY, Sun P (2020) Temporal arbitrage, fragmented rush, and opportunistic behaviors: the labor politics of time in the platform economy. Environ Plan B 9(22):1561–1579
Culpepper PD, Thelen K (2019) Are we all Amazon Primed? Consumers and the politics of platform power. Environ Plan B 53(2):288–318
Dannenberg P, Fuchs M, Riedler T, Wiedemann C (2020) Digital transition by Covid-19 pandemic? The German food online retail. Tijdschr Econ Soc Geogr 111(3):543–560CrossRef
Evans DS (2011) Platform economics: essays on multi-sided markets. Competition Policy International
Evans D, Schmalensee R (2016) Matchmakers: the new economics of multisided platforms. Harvard Business Review Press, Boston
Fields D, Bissell D, Macrorie R (2020) Platform methods: studying platform urbanism outside the black box. Urban Geogr 41(3):462–468CrossRef
Goodwin T (2015) The battle is for the customer interface. 4 Mar 2015. Techcrunch
Grabher G, König J (2020) Disruption, embedded. A Polanyian framing of the platform economy. Sociologica 14(1):95–118
Grabher G, van Tuijl E (2020) Uber-production: from global networks to digital platforms. Environ Plan A 52(5):1005–1016CrossRef
Graham M (2020) Regulate, replicate, and resist – the conjunctural geographies of platform urbanism. Urban Geogr 41(3):453–457CrossRef
Granovetter M (1985) Economic action and economic structure: the problem of embeddedness. Am J Sociol 91(3):481–510CrossRef
Gruszka K, Böhm M (2020) Out of sight, out of mind? (In)visibility of/in platform mediated work. New Media & Society
Hänninen M, Smedlund A (2019) On retail digital platforms suppliers have to become responsive customer service organizations. Strateg Leadersh 47(1):37–43CrossRef
Hänninen M, Smedlund A, Mitronen L (2018) Digitalization in retailing: multi-sided platforms as drivers of industry transformation. Balt J Manag 13(2):152–168CrossRef
Hänninen M, Mitronen L, Kwan SK (2019) Multi-sided marketplaces and the transformation of retail: a service systems perspective. J Retail Consum Serv 49:380–388CrossRef
Hardaker S (2022a) More than infrastructure providers – digital platforms’ role and power in retail digitalization initiatives in Germany. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie
Hardaker S (2022b) Local online marketplaces: intermediaries in the online local space [Lokale online-Marktplätze: Intermediäre im online-lokalen Raum]. In: Appel A, Hardaker S (eds) Innenstadt, (Einzel-)Handel und Covid-19, Geographischen Handelsforschung, vol 31, pp 153–176
Hardaker S, Appel A, Doll P, Ströbel K (2023) Digital retail platforms and urban actors – cooperation as a sustainable model? [Digitale Einzelhandelsplattformen und städtische Akteur*innen – Kooperation als zukunftsfähiges Modell?]. Standort
Hodson M, Kasmire J, McMeekin A, Stehlin J, Ward K (2020) Urban platforms and the future city: transformations in infrastructure, governance, knowledge and everyday life. Routledge, LondonCrossRef
Kenney M, Zysman J (2016) The rise of the platform economy. Issues Sci Technol 32(3):61–69
Kenney M, Zysman J (2019) Work and value creation in the platform economy. In: Kovalainen A, Vallas S (eds) Work and labor in the digital age. Emerald Publishing Limited, pp 13–41
Kenney M, Zysman J (2020) The platform economy: restructuring the space of capitalist accumulation. Camb J Reg Econ Soc 13(1):55–76CrossRef
Kenney M, Bearson D, Zysman J (2019) The platform economy matures: pervasive power, private regulation, and dependent entrepreneurs. Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. Working Paper 2019–11
Kirchner S, Schüßler E (2020) Regulating the sharing economy. Rev Sociol Organ 66:215–236CrossRef
Langley P, Leyshon A (2017) Platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation. Finance Soc 3(1):11–31CrossRef
Marketplace Pulse (2022) Amazon is adding thousands of new sellers daily. 07 Apr 2022
Mattioli D (2020) Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products. The Wall Street Journal, 23 Apr
Polanyi K (1957) The great transformation – the political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press, Boston
Rahman KS, Thelen K (2019) The rise of the platform business model and the transformation of twenty-first-century capitalism. Polit Soc 47(2):177–204CrossRef
Richardson L (2020) Coordinating the city: platforms as flexible spatial arrangements. Urban Geogr 41(3):458–461CrossRef
Sadowski J (2020) Cyberspace and cityscapes: on the emergence of platform urbanism. Urban Geogr 41(3):448–452CrossRef
Schwarz AJ (2017) Platform logic: an interdisciplinary approach to the platform-based economy. Policy Internet 9(4):374–394CrossRef
Srnicek N (2017) Platform capitalism. Polity Press, Cambridge
SZ (2021). UN-Bericht: Starker Umsatzsprung bei Online-Plattformen. 03.05.2021
Textilwirtschaft (2020) Innenstadt-Gipfel: Das sagen die Teilnehmer. 20 Oct 2020
Textilwirtschaft (2021). Plattformen sind das Ende des stationären Handels. 21 Jan 2021
van Dijck J, van Poell T, de Waal M (2018) The platform society. Oxford University PressCrossRef
van Doorn N (2019) A new institution on the block: on platform urbanism and Airbnb citizenship. Environ Plan B 22(10):1808–1826
Wang J, Coe NM (2021) Platform ecosystems and digital innovation in food retailing: exploring the rise of Hema in China. Geoforum 126:310–321CrossRef
Weitzel T, Wendt O, Westarb FV (2010) Reconsidering network effect theory. ECIS 2000 Proceedings. 91
Wood AJ, Graham M, Lehdon V, Hjorth I (2019) Networked but commodified: the (dis)embeddedness of digital labour in the gig economy. Sociology 53(5):931–950
Zhu F, Liu Q (2018) Competing with complementors: an empirical look at Amazon. Strateg Manag 39:2618–2642CrossRef
Zuboff S (2015) Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. J Inf Technol 30(1):75–89CrossRef
Zuboff S (2019) Surveillance capitalism and the challenge of collective action. New Labor Forum 28(1):10–29CrossRef
Metadata
Title
A Critical Perspective on the Increasing Power of Digital Platforms Through the Lens of Conjunctural Geographies
Author
Sina Hardaker
Copyright Year
2024
Book
Geographies of the Platform Economy

Print ISBN: 978-3-031-53593-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-53594-9

Copyright Year: 2024

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53594-9_6