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Digital platforms radically alter socio-economic and organizational patterns. In an ecological sense, they enable the rapid extension of tolerance limits by digitally scaling variables such as the availability of accommodation or labour. However, such maximization of specific variables in a complex ecology bears the danger of pathological runaway patterns. In our paper we draw on the work of Gregory Bateson to outline an analytical approach for the study of digital platforms as ecological phenomena, focusing on the effects of digitalization on the context in which platforms operate. To study such meta-patterns, we elaborate three interrelated concepts: stress, adaptation and budgets of flexibility. We exemplify these ideas through a longitudinal study of the early digital platform Couchsurfing and develop implications for our understanding of technology and organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of institutional work is habitually complicated by the need to combine agentic and structural features. Drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, the authors suggest that such complications emerge from an error in epistemology whereby the stability and “it-ness” of things is presupposed. As an alternative, they develop a processual analysis that considers the flexibility of adaptation in relational patterns. Here, institutional phenomena are not stable but characterized by regenerative and degenerative cycles of influence that afford or restrict room for maneuver without classifying them “as” something. The authors explicate this by drawing on empirical material covered in the HBO TV series The Wire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]