Economic geographies of the platform economy

Abstract der Sitzung

Over the past decade, platform economies have emerged in numerous spheres of social life. Both within and beyond the household, for instance, delivery platforms have started to restructure the geographies and rhythms of daily reproductive work and care. On an urban scale, new forms and functions of digital labour management, work organisation and control have emerged (Grabher/ van Tuij 2020; Kenney/ Zysman 2019; Woodcock/ Graham 2019), which - in turn - have also given rise to individual and collective practices of resistance waged by precarious, often migrant gig workers (Arubayi 2021; Woodcock 2021). Finally, platforms have also enabled new just-in-time geographies of worldwide logistics and are nowadays widely used as indispensable digital infrastructures in and across restructured global value chains (Howson et al. 2022).

Against this background, there are now lively debates on how digital platforms change economic and social relations across a whole variety of academic disciplines. Sociological perspectives on labour, for example, focus on forms of algorithmic management techniques and their impact on the labour process (Griesbach et al. 2019; Heiland 2021). Communication and media scholars examine what role class, race and gender play in workers’ everyday experience of platform work (van Doorn/ Vijay 2021; Gebrial 2022). Urban geography and urban sociology hone in on the importance of urban space and cities’ transformation under ‘platform urbanism’ (Ecker/ Strüver 2022; Strüver/ Bauriedl 2022).

Our aim of advancing and deepening ongoing debates on platform economies and their multiple socio-spatial interactions stems from discussions held at an international workshop on “Economic Geographies of the Platform Economy”, which took place at Berlin Social Science Center on 7 and 8 March 2023. Building on this two-day workshop, in this panel we discuss current developments of the platform nexus from a specifically economic- geographical perspective. In particular, presentations in this panel harness and critically reformulate existing conceptual vocabularies of economic geography, in order to deepen our understanding of platformisation in different social spheres and across various geographic scales. Particular areas of interest in this panel are (i) the role of platforms in restructuring global value chains and trade relations, (ii) the variety of functions that digital platforms take over within ecosystems of digital entrepreneurship, (iii) the relationship between ridehail platforms and the various regulatory functions of the state, (iv) the role of digital platforms in geographies of social reproduction and care.