The rise of digital platforms challenges traditional approaches to the organization of markets, work, and consumption and suggests a new economic era some have called the “platform economy.” The aim of this Special Issue is to better understand the socio-economic dynamics structuring the platform economy, with a focus on new “sharing” and gig labor platforms.
Platforms for “crowdsourcing”, “gigwork” and “sharing economy” such as Upwork, Uber and Airbnb organize buyer-seller relations in digitally-enabled marketplaces. These new marketplaces challenge existing economic practices and regulatory standards, disrupting established markets and forcefully creating new ones. A central feature of these marketplaces is the use of algorithms to set and enforce rules that shape the provision of services and labor. Our aim in this special issue is to bring together organizational, consumer, worker and regulatory perspectives on the platform economy to shed a new light on emerging market structures as well as central lines of contestation.
The four themes are “Platforms as Market Organizers”, “User Experiences and Consumption Patterns”, “Working in the Platform Economy” and “Contested Markets as a Challenge for Regulatory Actors and Established Institutions”.
Timeline and Submissions:
- Papers can be submitted immediately, but no later than 15 March, 2019.
- The targeted publication of the special issue is the July 2020 issue of Socio-Economic Review.
- The maximum length of articles including references, notes and abstract is 10,000 words.
- The main document has to be anonymous and should contain title, abstract, and strictly avoid self-references.