Platform power and regulatory politics: Polanyi for the twenty-first century

Cioffi, John W.; Kenney, Martín; Zysman, John

doi:10.1080/13563467.2022.2027355

Cited by 50 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…At the time of writing, signs mount that Big Tech’s digital monopolies might prove “volatile” (Dolata, 2019) after all. While most US corporations are still having a field day, calls for a reboot of antitrust rules are getting louder, with developments in the US, China, and the EU suggesting that states are assuming a more active role in taming Big Tech in the 2020s (Cioffi et al, 2022). In China, the central government’s latest series of measures targeting the tech sector—and its two Big Tech heavyweights in particular—have already resulted in confusion and uncertainty.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Augmenting digital monopolies: A corporate financialization perspective on the rise of Big Tech

Klinge

Hendrikse

Fernández

et al. 2022

Competition & Change

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Building on the notion of corporate financialization, this article analyzes the financial dynamics of the world’s largest digital platforms over the period 2000–2020: Alibaba, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and Tencent. These “Big Tech” corporations jointly form the infrastructural core of the digital economy. Taking cues from critical media studies and political economy, we probe their financial statements according to three stylized indicators of corporate financialization: (i) expanding financial assets and debt; (ii) augmenting asset structures, with intangible assets in the form of goodwill ballooning alongside tangible capital; and (iii) maximizing shareholder value. Our findings point to commonalities among the ‘avantgarde of digital capitalism’, where feedback loops between mounting market dominance, data extraction, and above-average profits have been successfully leveraged with key tools of corporate financialization to accelerate Big Tech’s infrastructural dominance across economy and society.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Augmenting digital monopolies: A corporate financialization perspective on the rise of Big Tech

Klinge

Hendrikse

Fernández

et al. 2022

Competition & Change

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“…As a result, there is a full-fledged understanding of the specific processes and mechanisms operating in its structure. Thus, the analysis of such structural elements enables qualitative influence and development in the necessary areas (Latinin & Kharchenko, 2021;Cioffi et al, 2022).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2022

Scientific Horizons

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Журнал включено до міжнародних наукометричних баз і каталогів наукових видань: Index Copernicus; Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); Open Academic Journals Index (OAJI); Google Scholar; Crossref; Національна бібліотека України імені В.І. Вернадського, AGRICOLA, CAB Abstracts and Global Health (CABI), Open Academic Journals Index, Scopus.

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“…Apart from the United States China is the only country that succeeded in fostering the growth of globally important platform firms, However, over time this growth came to threaten important state and societal interests. In China, as elsewhere, the platform economy has rewired the flow of ideas, information, and money as these firms took on the characteristics of public utilities, becoming private regulators of evermore economic sectors (Cioffi et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our current understanding of the platform economy is largely rooted in the experiences of the United States and Europe, both of which are dominated by the US‐based platform giants (Cioffi et al, 2022; Helberger et al, 2018; Kenney & Zysman, 2019; Rahman & Thelen, 2019). As such, these lessons may have limited explanatory value for China, where the rapid spread of internet‐based connectivity (Jia & Winseck, 2018; Liu, 2012; Yang, 2011), digital transformation of Chinese society (Yu, 2017a) and interventionist state (Kroeber, 2007; Naughton, 2007) have resulted in the growth of a technologically advanced platform economy dominated by its own domestic platform giants.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regulating the platform giants: Building and governing China's online economy

2023

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The online platform economy in China has grown to become one of the largest in the world. Its growth has contributed to China's economic development and played an important role in its innovation path. We present a three‐stage structured explanation of China's governance approaches toward its homegrown platform firms. Using Chinese government documents and secondary sources to conduct a historical process tracing analysis, we argue that the growth of China's main platform firms and the government's governance of them was co‐evolutionary, guided by the party‐state's goals of maintaining social‐political stability, economic growth and strengthening technological self‐sufficiency. By so doing this paper addresses the fundamental question of how a “strong” and “capable” state such as China's has responded as platform firms went from providing various online services to becoming core infrastructure in the economy and society to the point of threatening core government objectives.

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Platform power and regulatory politics: Polanyi for the twenty-first century

Cited by 50 publications

References 21 publications

Augmenting digital monopolies: A corporate financialization perspective on the rise of Big Tech

Augmenting digital monopolies: A corporate financialization perspective on the rise of Big Tech

Untitled

Regulating the platform giants: Building and governing China's online economy

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