Approaches to digital platforms: Analysis of academic production (2000 – 2022)

Abstract

The text analyzes academic production on digital platforms in order to discuss approaches to the phenomenon. To this end: i) maps works dealing with digital platforms and their temporal distribution; ii) analyses the presence of texts that conceptualize the phenomenon and deal with governance/regulation and competition; iii) identifies and characterizes different strands, concepts and taxonomies. The corpus consists of 508 texts published between 2000 and 2022, indexed in Google Scholar, whose titles and abstracts were analyzed. In addition to the quantitative analysis, ten articles with a conceptual approach are discussed and categorized. In order to ascertain the framing of the problem and the vision of the relationship between technology and society, their approaches were classified, following Feenberg (2010), into four strands: instrumentalism, determinism, substantivism and critical theory. He concludes that there are few studies looking at the conceptualization of the phenomenon and that instrumental and deterministic analyses predominate, based on case studies, which compromises the approach to the functioning of platforms in different sectors. The aim of this analysis is to contribute to an approach that historicizes the phenomenon and the theories that analyse it.