Uber-production: From global networks to digital platforms

Abstract

Uber and Airbnb have advanced into emblematic cases in debates in which the new digital capitalism is framed in terms of the so-called sharing economy. While this strand of inquiry has produced a wealth of insights into the workings and impacts of peer-to-peer platforms, the digital transformation of business-to-business interactions has so far attracted less attention. The present Exchange confronts this challenge by juxtaposing platform conceptions with a pre-eminent framework to conceptualize business-to-business relations: global production networks (GPN). Specifically, this Exchange addresses challenges posed by the platform approach for the GPN framework in the four dimensions: value (from owning assets to granting access), governance (from make-or-buy to employ-or-enable), management (from back-end to front-end) and labour (from jobs to gigs).