Taking the measure of digital giants: Amazon and the Social Welfare Computing research agenda

Frantz Rowe () and M. Lynne Markus ()
Additional contact information
Frantz Rowe: Nantes Université, LEMNA and Institut d’Administration des Entreprises
M. Lynne Markus: Bentley University

Electronic Markets, 2022, vol. 32, issue 2, No 5, 437-446

Abstract: Abstract How can and should the IS field best contribute to the Social Welfare Computing research agenda, which seeks to assess unintended consequences and propose better solutions related to the potential harms of digital business practices? In this discussion paper, we take Amazon.com, Inc. as an instance of a giant digital company and examine it structurally as a sociotechnical actor engaging in a broad range of digital features and business practices. The picture that emerges from this analysis (a company engaging in systematically unfair competitive behavior) is quite different from one derived from the IS literature about Amazon as a company (a technologically savvy and strategically successful player). This analysis is provisional and deserves to be reproduced, possibly by reassembling the IS literature on such topics as electronic marketplaces, recommender systems, and online reviews, into a specific profile for each of the digital giants. Regardless, the analysis is this paper suggests the possibility of blindspots in traditional IS research on digital business activities, and it offers some suggestions for future research on the Social Welfare Computing research agenda. In particular, IS scholarship should emphasize corporate actors in addition to isolated technology features and business practices.

Keywords: Social Welfare Computing; Digital giants; Competition; Regulation and regulators; Industry structure analysis; Sociotechnical analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L4 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12525-022-00544-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:elmark:v:32:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s12525-022-00544-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ystems/journal/12525

DOI: 10.1007/s12525-022-00544-0

Access Statistics for this article

Electronic Markets is currently edited by Rainer Alt and Hans-Dieter Zimmermann

More articles in Electronic Markets from Springer, IIM University of St. Gallen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().