Working Papers

2020

What Polanyi Teaches Us: The Platform Economy and Structural Change

Martin Kenney, John Zysman, and Dafna Bearson

The rise of the platform economy marks the latest phase in the ongoing digital revolution. Indeed, the platform is to this digital era what the factory was to the industrial era, both a symbol and an organizing mechanism. Gernot Grabher and Jonas König (2020) used Karl Polanyi’s analysis of what he termed the “great transformation” to frame the rise of platform economy. The platform economy is remarkable as it confirms Polanyi’s (and Marx’s before him) insight that the reach of the market is based upon increased commodification as it has been able to reach into ever more parts of social life. We introduced the term “platform economy” in 2015 because we recognized that the digital platforms were changing the dynamics of capitalist accumulation – an analysis framed by regulationist school of political economy.  The intuition was that the socio-technical innovation of digital online platforms was the critical fulcrum for an economic restructuring that would rewire the flows of data and ultimately money and power. The firms we have termed the mega-platforms, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have become the most valuable and powerful firms in the world. Importantly, the reach of these platforms is global and yet local and personal. Moreover, platform power has been reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Download the Full Paper.

Governing AI: Understanding the Limits, Possibility, and Risks of AI in an Era of Intelligent Tools and Systems

John Zysman and Mark Nitzberg

In debates about artificial intelligence (AI), imaginations often run wild. Policy-makers, opinion leaders, and the public tend to believe that AI is already an immensely powerful universal technology, limitless in its possibilities. However, while machine learning (ML), the principal computer science tool underlying today’s AI breakthroughs, is indeed powerful, ML is fundamentally a form of context-dependent statistical inference and as such has its limits. Specifically, because ML relies on correlations between inputs and outputs or emergent clustering in training data, today’s AI systems can only be applied in well-specified problem domains, still lacking the context-sensitivity of a typical toddler or house-pet. Consequently, instead of constructing policies to govern artificial general intelligence (AGI), decision-makers should focus on the distinctive and powerful problems posed by narrow AI, including misconceived benefits and the distribution of benefits, autonomous weapons, and bias in algorithms. AI governance, at least for now, is less about managing super-intelligent systems than about managing those who would create and deploy them and supporting the application of AI to narrow, well-defined problem domains. Download the Full Paper.

Digitalization and Platforms in Agriculture: Organizations, Power Asymmetry, and Collective Action Solutions

Martin Kenney, Hiam Serhan, and Gilles Trystram, April 2020

Technologies such as digitally-equipped agricultural equipment, drones, image recognition, sensors, robots and artificial intelligence are being rapidly adopted throughout the agri-food system, leading to the generation and use of ever more data. The benefits of data sharing for efficiency, productivity and sustainability are predicated upon the adoption of an online digital platform. The conundrum is that, as the intermediary, the owner of a successful platform acquires significant power in relationship to the platform sides. This paper identifies five types of platform business models/ownership arrangements and their benefits and drawbacks for the various actors in the agri-food system, assesses the business models for each of these organizational forms, and describes the drawbacks each of these organizational forms have experienced as they attempt to secure adoption of their particular platform solution. Download the full paper.

The Platform Economy Matures: Pervasive Power, Private Regulation, and Dependent Entrepreneurs

Martin Kenney, Dafna Bearson, and John Zysman, November 2019

Platforms are an emblem and embodiment of the digital era just as factories were of the industrial revolution. Digital platforms, through their power in their respective ecosystems, are intermediating and contributing to the reorganization of ever-greater segments of the economy and society. As this occurs, existing firms, jobs, and labor relationships are being displaced or transformed, even while new tasks and enterprises are emerging, and existing firms are adjusting. This paper explores the ways in which platform firms are insinuating themselves into ever more parts of the economy. Download the full paper.

The Platform Economy and Geography: Restructuring the Space of Capitalist Accumulation

Martin Kenney and John Zysman, November 2019

Digital online platform firms are reorganizing the geography of how value is created and who captures it and where. This essay argues that economic geographers have underestimated the power of platform and the firms that control them.  To illustrate the impact on the geography of value creation, we undertake cases studies of two platforms, Amazon and Google Maps, to explicate their effects upon the location of economic activity. These platform leaders have the largest data sets and have created enormous teams of the best AI, machine learning resarchers, and, finally, have enormous reservoirs of capital with which to capture new technologies that may threaten them. Download the full paper.

Labor in the Platform Economy: New Work Created, Old Work Reorganized and Value Creation Reconfigured

Dafna Bearson, Martin Kenney, and John Zysman, May 2019

How do platform organizations create new jobs and reorganize old work? And how is value created in the platform economy? Platforms have profoundly altered market logic and dynamics, and challenge us to rethink the ways we define labor and value creation. In this paper, Dafna Bearson, Martin Kenney, and John Zysman present a new taxonomy of platform work that focuses on the reorganization of work in the platform era and apply this framework to the work generated by Etsy and Amazon publishing. Download the full paper.


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