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This critical review of research on platform-mediated work argues that platform work studies are too focused on gig and remote work platforms. We introduce a framework that identifies three perspectives on how platforms reorganize work: narrow, broad, and systemic. This framework is used to examine the impact of platform-mediated work on four different aspects of work: management power, work processes, social protection and labor rights, and skills and career prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though economists have examined labor displacement due to digitization, few have considered the new work and value created. Unlike employment relations that brought workers together on the assembly line or in an office in a previous era, platforms enable a greater, more dispersed, and complex division of labor. New and reconfigured types of labor enabled by platforms create identification and measurement challenges. Previous studies of platforms invariably focused on specific organizational forms such as sharing or gigs. They built taxonomies based on the platform's organization – few considered the scope and scale of platform-enabled value creation. To better understand changing labor arrangements in the 21st century, this article introduces a taxonomy to systematically understand work, employment, and value creation in the platform economy. We consider all of the platform-enabled value creation activities including old work displaced or reorganized to new work created. We provide suggestive evidence for the utility of our framework through case studies of Etsy and Amazon Self-Publishing in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online platforms are pervasive and powerful in today's economy. We explore the increased centrality of platforms in two ways. First, we measure the extent to which platforms are insinuating themselves into the economy. We accomplish this by analyzing the presence of platforms as intermediating organizations across all US service industries at the six-digit North American Industry Classification System code level. Our results show that 70% of service industries, representing over 5.2 million establishments, are potentially affected by one or more platforms. Secondly, we undertake a detailed firm-level case study of the mega-platform, Amazon, which demonstrates the ways that the aforementioned macro-level data is expressed by a single platform firm. This case study shows that Amazon's growth trajectory has resulted in it entering and transforming existing industries and sectors. We conclude by reflecting upon the limitations and implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The platform economy and its leading firms, such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, are reorganising the geography of value creation and capture on both a local and global scale. This article argues that economic geographers have underappreciated the implications of the platform on space. First, we demonstrate the concentration of platform giants in terms of location on the US West Coast and in terms of their market share in various services, such as search, maps and online sales. Platforms are simultaneously intermediaries, two-sided markets, data aggregators and leading users of artificial intelligence (AI). Second, we use a labour taxonomy to demonstrate the extensive reach of these platforms in terms of the labour markets that they serve and shape. To illustrate these changes in the geography of value creation, we present case studies of Amazon and Google Maps to show their effects on the location of economic activity. Third, we elaborate on our contention that platforms are at once intermediaries and data hubs. AI is likely to reinforce the power of these platform leaders because they have the largest data sets, the most computational power, enormous teams of the best AI researchers and vast reservoirs of capital that they can use to make acquisitions. We conclude by identifying areas for future research and calling upon economic geographers to consider the implications of the platform economy in reshaping the space of economic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with approaches to growth theory that argue for historically created, institutionally rooted national development trajectories. There are varied ways of organizing market economies, and there is more than just one kind of capitalism. The institutional approach begins with the observation that markets, embedded in political and social institutions, are the creation of government and politics. Indeed all economic interchange takes place within institutions and groups. Markets do not exist or operate apart from the rules and institutions that establish them and that structure how buying, selling and the very organization of production takes place. Consequently there are multiple market capitalisms, and in a global economy international competition among members must be understood as an interplay of these various national market systems. Focus is on the historically rooted national institutions which frame the choices of individuals and structure the terms on which issues such as agency problems and contract problems are confronted. The approach proposed in this paper is a necessary complement to an institutionalism more familiar in economics. This historical institutionalism frames problems and provides answers to puzzles that concern microeconomic-based institutionalism. The particular historical course of each nation's development creates a political economy with a distinctive institutional structure for governing the markets of labor, land, capital and goods. The institutional structure induces particular kinds of corporate and government behavior by constraining and by laying out a logic to the market and policy-making process that is particular to that political economy...

Examines the role of the state on international trade. Importance of open trade on maintaining international order; Type of orderly marketing agreements; Influence of politics on state trading.