Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

Digital peer-to-peer service platform organizations need to mobilize users’ trust in order to attract and retain users. While prior research has provided a rich picture of the use and effectiveness of platform-inherent institutional mechanisms to build trust, we know little about how institution-based trust is mobilized in the early stages of platform organizations, when those mechanisms are not yet effective. Drawing on in-depth qualitative data from early-stage peer-to-peer service platform organizations in Panama and Mexico, we find that platform entrepreneurs engage in a delicate process of “grounding institution-based trust”—iteratively combining technology- and data-based mechanisms with practices that eliminate high risks, personally familiarize users, and leverage platform communities. The process model we develop shows how these practices depend on one another, how they develop over time and gradually enable institution-based mechanisms to become effective. We contribute to our understanding of trust in the context of digital peer-to-peer platform organizations, of institution-based trust and its production more generally, and of resource mobilization in early-stage organizations.

In this paper we argue that a depiction of platform work as market-based is too simplistic, because platform-mediated work also involves highly skilled tasks that require some coordination and even cooperation, e.g. in the case of design or software development. Platform workers in these sectors offer professional services, have a high level of technical skills, and can secure a stable income by building and maintaining long-term business relationships with their clients (Vallas & Schor, 2020). Platforms, thus, do not just organize markets, but organize labour markets in which workers build their careers and develop psychological contracts. Given recent regulatory contestations around the classification of platform-mediated work, we hence believe that the underlying employment-like system of platforms as a particular form of organization that is neither hierarchy, nor market, nor network (Grabher & König, 2020; Schüßler et al., 2021; Watkins & Stark, 2018) deserves further consideration, which promises broader insights about “platformisation” as a mode of organizing more generally.

Digital commons possess immense potential for promoting global sustainable value creation in terms of a more open, democratic and knowledge-sharing favorable society. However, digital commons face severe challenges in today’s capitalist political economy due to misconceptions about resource dependencies and the blend of private and public communal interests. In this conceptual piece, I challenge two overly optimistic notions about digital commons: that they rely exclusively on financially independent volunteerism and mainly cater to communal interests. To illustrate this, I explore open-source software (OSS) as a paradigm for the digital commons and synthesize existing literature on OSS projects’ intricate relationships with private sector, public sector, and civil society actors. I use configurational theorizing to conceptualize three relational configurations: beneath, between, and beyond market and state. These configurations navigate the evolution of OSS as a digital commons by emphasizing two interwoven critical factors: resource de-pendency and interest interdependency. These factors present valuable opportunities for scholars and policymakers by allowing for nuanced reasoning rather than portraying OSS as either fully extracted by capitalism or as a radical alternative form of organizing. I further facilitate nuanced reasoning by identifying three revelatory mechanisms: enlightened governance of communal interests, enlightened private interests, and institutions for collective action.