The Rise of the Platform Business Model and the Transformation of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism

K. Sabeel Rahman and Kathleen Thelen
Additional contact information
K. Sabeel Rahman: Brooklyn Law School
Kathleen Thelen: MIT

Politics & Society, 2019, vol. 47, issue 2, 177-204

Abstract: This article explores the changing nature of twenty-first-century capitalism with an emphasis on illuminating the political coalitions and institutional conditions that support and sustain it. Most of the existing literature attributes the changing nature of the firm to developments in markets and technology. By contrast, this article emphasizes the political forces that have driven the transformation of the twentieth-century consolidated firm through the firm as a “network of contracts†and toward the platform firm. Moreover, situating the United States in a comparative perspective highlights the distinctive ways US political-economic institutions have facilitated that transformation and exacerbated the associated inequalities.

Keywords: United States; political economy; platform capitalism; antitrust; consumers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329219838932 (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:polsoc:v:47:y:2019:i:2:p:177-204

DOI: 10.1177/0032329219838932

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().