Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Platforms are changing the rules of organizing, strategizing, and innovating. By operating digital infrastructures that nudge and facilitate interactions between two or more user sides (Jacobides et al., 2024; Kretschmer et al., 2022), digital platforms do not own resources that users seek, but govern their access and distribution (Chen et al., 2022; Gawer, 2021; Reischauer & Mair, 2018a). These governance efforts entail standardizing interactions and regulating user behaviors (de Vaujany et al., 2018; Kellogg et al., 2020; Kornberger et al., 2017), and inconsistencies in these efforts can trigger social contagion of misconduct (Gawer & Harraca, 2025). Digital platforms have been observed to grow at hyper speed in industries they are active in and in new ones they enter to “colonize” them (Giustiziero et al., 2023; Ozalp et al., 2022; Zeng et al., 2023). Some, often referred to as Big Tech, branch out at such scale that they become conglomerates operating multiple platforms with strong synergies (Aversa et al., 2021; Li et al., 2019). Conglomerates especially exert significant influence over how organizations communicate and behave (Van Dijck, 2021; Zuboff, 2022). In recent years, organizational scholars have increasingly explored this platformization of business and society.

One group of scholars examined platformization dynamics from an institutional angle (e.g., Garud et al., 2022; Gawer & Phillips, 2013; Holzmann et al., 2025; Mair & Reischauer, 2017; Uzunca et al., 2018), providing insights into how platforms create, reshape, and undermine the cognitive, normative, and regulative structures and practices of fields; recent studies also examined the role of platforms in combating false information (Barrett et al., 2025). Others have explored how platforms establish and maintain dependencies (Cutolo & Kenney, 2021; Reischauer & Mair, 2018b). Recent work has turned to how workers (Cameron & Rahman, 2021; Karanovic et al., 2021) and established organizations—notably firms—navigate these dependencies. Organizational responses include collaborating with established rivals and competing platforms (Reischauer et al., 2026) and framing to encourage others not to join platforms (Fraser & Ansari, 2021; Reischauer et al., 2026). Another line of research has studied how platforms reshape knowledge paradigms and knowledge cultures (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2022; Beyes et al., 2022). These studies indicate that platforms and their digital artifacts reconfigure perceptions of business and society, thereby catalyzing new practices both within organizations and in fields (Alaimo, 2022; Saifer & Dacin, 2022). Among these new practices are disorganizing (Ratner & Plotnikof, 2022) and knowledge communing (Qureshi et al., 2022). Finally, a growing body of scholarship investigates how Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based applications and organizations utilizing them reconstitute data practices and interpretations across platforms and other organizational forms (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2024; Gregory et al., 2021). For instance, it has been noted that the increasing adoption of platforms and AI-based applications is making decisions and organizational life more “black boxed” (Hinds & von Krogh, 2024), changing visibility and transparency of and around organizations (Reischauer & Ringel, 2023).

This sub-theme is in the spirit of these and related studies. Specifically, it provides a forum to take stock and collectively further advance research on the responses to, as well as routes and prospects of platformization of business and society. We welcome studies applying diverse methodologies, including conceptual papers. Authors are also encouraged to draw on various theoretical lenses from organization studies and related disciplines.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Routes

• What pathways and processes are characteristic of the platformization—and potentially also the de-platformization—of business and society?

• How do platforms frame, make sense of, and/or work institutions in order to change markets, fields, and ecosystems?

• How do platform-specific framing contests emerge and unfold, and with what effects?

• How are knowledge and visibility paradigms reconfigured because of platforms and AI-based applications?

• How is knowledge reconfigured to resist platformization and processing by AI-based applications, notably Generative AI?

• How do platforms establish new dependencies between actors—including non-human actors—within and across organizational boundaries, and what established dependencies are dissolved because of platforms?

Responses

• When and how do established forms of organizing—such as firms, policy-makers, media, interest groups, and social movements—oppose or support platforms and processes of platformization?

• How do established organizations shield themselves or their environment from platformization and AI-based organizations?

• What are nonmarket responses to platformization?

• What dilemmas and paradoxes do organizational responses cause for whom, and how do these actors navigate them?

• Which responses can reduce potentially harmful platforms and AI-based organizations?

Prospects

• How will the rise of platforms—especially those operated by Big Tech conglomerates—and AI-based organizations redefine interdependencies, knowledge paradigms, and institutions?

• How are platforms changing the inner workings of established organizations?

• How can we foster an integration of research on platform organizing and strategizing as well as algorithmic organizing?
   

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• Alaimo, C., & Kallinikos, J. (2024). Data rules: Reinventing the market economy. The MIT Press.
• Aversa, P., Haefliger, S., Hueller, F., & Reza, D. G. (2021). Customer complementarity in the digital space: Exploring Amazon’s business model diversification. Long Range Planning, 54(5), Article 101985. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2020.101985
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• Uzunca, B., Rigtering, J. P. C., & Ozcan, P. (2018). Sharing and shaping: A cross-country comparison of how sharing economy firms shape their institutional environment to gain legitimacy. Academy of Management Discoveries, 4(3), 248–272. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2016.0153
• Van Dijck, J. (2021). Seeing the forest for the trees: Visualizing platformization and its governance. New Media & Society, 23(9), 2801–2819. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820940293
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