The unexpected persistence of non-corporate platforms: The role of local and network embeddedness

Abstract

The Covid19-pandemic has accelerated processes in which digital platforms, privileged by their critical size, become central instances of urban life. While most scholars associate platform urbanism with transnational platform corporations, such as Amazon or Facebook, local non-corporate platforms unexpectedly persist despite lacking critical size. This article analyzes processes through which non-corporate platforms are created, maintained, disseminated, and locally implemented; given this type of platform's absence of critical size. We explain the persistence of local non-corporate platforms by drawing on the concept of embeddedness. Embeddedness accounts for non-market-based, i.e. socially and culturally influenced behavior, that shapes economic interactions. We distinguish between network embeddedness, in which organizations maintain permanent and exclusive relationships with one another, and local embeddedness, which combines Hess' (2004) notions of societal embeddedness and territorial embeddedness. This article is empirically grounded on an analysis of two most different ways of creating and maintaining, disseminating, and locally implementing non-corporate platforms: Platform cooperativism and free/libre open-source software-based platforms (FLOSS-based platforms). Two empirical case studies of collaboratively governed Western-European non-corporate platforms, Gebiedonline and Decidim, respectively inform the analysis of platform cooperativism and FLOSS-based platforms. Gebiedonline is a platform cooperative through which neighborhood and theme-specific platforms are created. Decidim is a FLOSS-based platform that is mainly used for civic and political participation processes. We find that governments and civil society stakeholders create non-corporate platform technology by disentangling processes related to the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of platform technology from platform implementation processes. Following platform creation, platform maintenance is embedded in a network. Non-corporate platforms pool cost-intensive technology maintenance, while platform implementation necessarily takes place in a locally embedded manner.