数字战场:当代平台的权力动态与治理

Digital Battlegrounds: The Power Dynamics and Governance of Contemporary Platforms

ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT ANNALS · 2024
被引 31
人大 AFT50ABS 4*

中文导读

指出数字平台不仅是交易工具,更是权力争夺的战场,并从行动者、关系、面孔和斗争四个维度整合现有研究,提出六项可检验命题,呼吁管理学者深入探讨平台权力问题。

Abstract

The ubiquity of digital platforms is undeniable, as is their transactional efficiency and world-flattening possibilities. Yet, these platforms are contested battlegrounds where stakeholder power struggles reflect and influence broader societal turbulence. In the emerging era, alongside the blinding speed and global reach of the gig economy are looming specters of rentier capitalism, digi-serfdom, misinformation, data exploitation, digital addiction, and near-ungovernable algorithmic agents. To date, scholarly focus on digital platforms has been on their transactional features and impacts, dimensionalizing governance mechanisms as emanating from old economy conceptions of bottom-up or top-down checks and balances, or incentives and efficiencies. These emphases, while useful for understanding managerial control of digital platforms, largely ignore the extent to which digital platforms are contested organizational spaces, shaped by complex power dynamics. Foucault (1998: 63) asserted that power is everywhere, and that those who hold power are rarely well-understood by those who are subject to it. In seeking to rebalance and reorient digital platform research, we analyze and integrate existing research along four dimensions that shape platform power dynamics: actors, relations, faces, and struggle. We establish a future research agenda—including six testable propositions—that more thoroughly engages the critical, yet untapped, expertise of management scholars concerning platform power.

数字平台权力动态平台治理管理研究