Platforms, infrastructures and the Futures of market society

Abstract

This conceptual paper develops an infrastructure approach to digital platforms. We examine how and to what effect some digital platforms evolve into infrastructures that underpin market practices within and across sectors using examples from the retail sector. Our analysis offers three insights. First, platforms expand through the development of infrastructural services and the pursuit of integration with third parties, including other platforms. Second, the rise of platform-as-infrastructures suggests a transition from a market to a platform society where economic processes are increasingly reliant on the harvesting of data to fuel and fine-tune algorithms, business models and data flows. Third, platforms-as-infrastructures are built on much shorter cycles than conventional infrastructures, are programmable and rely on a light asset base which enables them to evolve quickly in response to changing environmental conditions. We draw out a number of implications from our analysis for the future of the market society.