Platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: Theorizing a hyper-scalable computing regime

Devika Narayan

Environment and Planning A, 2022, vol. 54, issue 5, 911-929

Abstract: There has been an explosion of scholarship on platform capitalism , with scholars identifying emergent labor practices, organizational forms, and business models. There is broad agreement that successful platform companies quickly dominate their markets, and winner-takes-all scenarios are common. However, market domination should not only be viewed as a condition but also as a process that is defined by specific drivers and practices. With regard to rapid expansion, much is said about network effects and data-intensive business models that are fueled by speculative logics as well as weak regulatory mechanisms. I advance the discussion on expansion and hyper-scalability by focusing on the transformation in underlying computing arrangements that shape the growth of platform-based companies. This article establishes cloud computing arrangements as setting the foundational sociotechnical infrastructure that drives rapid expansion.

Keywords: Infrastructure; platform capitalism; platform economy; cloud computing; software industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X221094028 (text/html)

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:sae:envira:v:54:y:2022:i:5:p:911-929

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X221094028

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().