Varieties of Platform Capitalism. A Comparative Political Economy Perspective on Digitalization

In recent times, a lot has been written about the economic and social transformations digital technologies have brought about. There is much talk of societies entering a second machine age and living through a Big Data or fourth industrial revolution (Brynjolfsson/McAfee 2014; Mayer-Schönberger/Cukier 2013; Schwab 2016). One of the common themes behind the revolutionary basso continuo of these debates is that digitalization gives rise to new models of doing business centered around a new mode of production: the platform (McAfee/Brynjolfsson 2017; Parker et al. 2016; Srnicek 2017; Sundararajan 2016). In the first part of my paper I want to briefly summarize this literature and tease out what I consider the essential political-economic features and socio-political challenges of platform capitalism. In short and somewhat pretentious terms, my argument is that platform capitalism is the result of the confluence of technological and social enablers. Together, they have ushered in a new wave of Schumpeterian creative destruction and Polanyian disembedding which are both propelled and exploited by profit-seeking entrepreneurs. These dynamics confront advanced capitalist societies with a number of challenges which involve the careful balancing of the promises of efficiency and the perils of commodification. Three challenges – or fields of contested institutionalization – stand out: digital labor market regulation in the times of gig- and crowd work; privacy protection in times of increasing economic pressures to commodify personal data; and social investments in digital skills and infrastructure in times of a rough-and-tumble global knowledge economy. Importantly, different countries react differently to these challenges, depending on their particular structural and institutional legacies. These differences break digitalization, as it were, into different national varieties, opening up the field of the comparative political economy of platform capitalism. Until now, there have only been very few studies which tackle national (or regional) varieties of platform capitalism, i.e. that describe and try to explain different policy and institutional responses to the challenges posed by the newest wave of digitalization. Against this background, the second part of my paper will present some preliminary evidence on the diversity of platform capitalism in Europe, contrasting, in particular, the German and the Swedish case.