Exploring Alternative (Non-Economic) Forms of Value Engendered by Digital Platforms

Digital platforms, and their implications for business and society, have gained widespread and multidisciplinary popularity in recent years (e.g. Howcroft and Bergvall-Kåreborn 2019; Sutherland and Jarrahi 2018; Zutshi and Grilo 2019). Scholars have studied the multifaceted consequences of digital platforms, including: the impact of labour platforms on the future of work, such as working conditions, identity and professionalisation (Berg et al. 2018; Bosma 2022; Dunn 2020; Elbanna and Idowu 2022; Idowu and Elbanna 2021; Taylor and Joshi 2019); the effects of knowledge datafication on digital transformation of organisations (Alaimo 2021); commodification and subsequent exploitation of emerging platform economies such as ‘user experience’ (Lupton 2014) and ‘emotional economy’ (Patulny, Lazarevic, and Smith 2020); inevitable surveillance afforded by platform algorithms (Galière 2020; Newlands 2021; Zuboff 2019); their implications for development (Anwar and Graham 2020; Bonina et al. 2021; Nicholson, Nielsen, and Saebo 2021); and new forms of activism in response to platforms' colonial effects (Chamakiotis, Petrakaki, and Panteli 2021). The value, and specifically the non-economic value, platforms produce has however remained understudied.

In the literature that explores platforms' value (e.g. Nachtwey and Schaupp 2024; Pesce, Neirotti, and Paolucci 2019; Sutherland and Jarrahi 2018; Zutshi and Grilo 2019), most studies have approached value from an economic perspective looking into profitability, income generation and return on investment (e.g. Constantinides, Henfridsson, and Parker 2018; Wang, Guo, and Liu 2024). This should be no surprise. Research in Information Systems (IS) has primarily focused on the Western world, the Global North, aiming to understand it better, to improve it further and to increase its productivity and efficiency through IS. Clarke and Davison (2020) find that most IS literature is in fact dominated by a focus on the economic dimension, with little or no attention paid to the non-economic dimensions of IS, such as their social and environmental aspects or their potential to educate, to free and to enlighten. Similarly, a recent paper curation found that 40% of articles on platforms published in the Management Information Systems Quarterly draw upon economic theory (Krishnan et al. 2024). Economic notions of value have prevailed insofar that technology often becomes associated with the value it is supposed to produce: ‘write software save lives’ as Sahay (2016) reports. Yet, how transferable, relevant and purposeful are such aims for the rest of the world and what moral questions does a unidirectional focus on economic value raise?

Our Special Issue aligns with early IS scholarship concerned with the ethical challenge of creating a better world through and with IS (Walsham 1993, 2017) and recent emerging calls in our field to explore how IS research could contribute to the production of societal value (e.g. Krishnan et al. 2024) and the creation of better futures (Davison et al. 2023). We place this issue within IS scholarship which has begun to look at the social value that platforms may afford (e.g. Barrett, Oborn, and Orlikowski 2016; Chamakiotis, Petrakaki, and Panteli 2021; Goh, Gao, and Agarwal 2016), including wider, non-economic forms of value for their members and beyond (e.g. for their local communities).

So far, different terms have been used to refer to non-economic forms of value engendered by digital platforms: ‘social value’ (Chamakiotis, Petrakaki, and Panteli 2021), ‘platforms for development’ (Bonina et al. 2021), ‘platforms for the co-creation of public value’ (Meijer and Boon 2021) and ‘societal digital platforms’ (Choudhary, Kaushik, and Bharadwaj 2021). Our aim with the present Special Issue is to add to this developing area of IS by producing a collection of articles that provide novel insights and new understandings around platform-engendered forms of value in a range of empirical contexts, such as the Global South, and sectors and using potentially different methodological approaches.

We begin this Editorial by contextualising the topic of value within IS research (Section 2) and identifying emerging views of value in the existing literature on platforms (Section 3) to provide a theoretical context for our Special Issue. Following, we present each of the accepted articles and explain how they contribute to the advancement of the field (Section 4). In the last section, we present the collective contributions of our Special Issue and provide ideas for future research (Section 5).

Technologies and systems have somehow always been associated with the value they engender. Early notions of value have been associated with modernisation and development. For example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) associates technology with productivity and economic development, whereas the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals acknowledge that technology plays a role in achieving various goals including health, education, poverty, hunger, gender equality, water and sanitation and clean energy. The discourse on modernisation has gone hand in hand with the adoption of ‘successful’ technologies. Driven by technological determinism, this discourse has unfortunately systematically neglected both context and human agency (Dobson and Nicholson 2017; Sein and Harindranath 2004). At the same time, less emphasis has been placed on how technology with its modernising potential can contribute to human development, defined in terms of freedom, poverty, equality and education (Sen 2001). IS scholarship has also acknowledged that technology may exacerbate inequalities and dichotomies between rich and poor, not only by producing technological dependencies, but also through intensification of digital divides and reproduction of relations of power (Kwet 2019).

A specialised subfield of IS research focused on IS in the Developing Context (ISDC), or Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D), emerged in the mid-1980s/1990s with the intention of exploring more closely the different local contexts within which technologies are implemented and used; the principles with which technologies get designed; the local cultures and knowledge that gets produced (Indigenous theory); and the ways in which technologies constitute a part of a larger local reform that speaks to wider societal benefits and value (Avgerou 2008, 2017; Walsham 2017). Interest in ISDC/ICT4D research is widespread, with many IS conferences organising tracks in this area; dedicated journals, such as Information Technology for Development and The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries; and an International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group (WG), IFIP WG 9.4, which was created in 1988 and continues to be very active today (Davison et al. 2024).

IS research has provided significant examples of implementations of technologies in different settings, that were aiming to bring value to local communities. For example, Bernardi (2017) looked into the potential of a health IS to strengthen democratic accountability in Kenya; Sahay (2016) explored a health tracking system in India, aiming to monitor mothers and children's compliance with essential health programmes; and Walsham and Sahay (1999) studied the implementation of a Geographic IS (GIS) in India to support district-level administration. As these studies point out, often their intentions were overruled by a prevalent economic logic and output orientation that diminished technological potential. These, and other examples, offer evidence of one-off attempts of technologies that have largely been designed in a well-resourced context with the intention of being used in a different context and usually for a limited period of time. Digital platforms constitute a different type of technological intervention, as they provide not only the possibility for local shaping, due to their modularity, but also a more permanent basis for individuals to innovate.

Existing literature offers different typologies of platforms. Gawer's (2014) early typology distinguished platforms on the basis of their design and thus identified platforms as markets and platforms as technological architectures. Meijer and Boon (2021) distinguish platforms in terms of their governance between: (a) closed platforms led by the private sector; (b) open platforms led by governments; and (c) open platforms led by civil society organisations. Rajala et al. (2022) challenge the above distinctions by arguing that digital platforms are essentially hybrids. These authors take the case of Airbnb as a privately governed platform whose aim is to create some sort of social value. Bonina et al. (2021) identify three perspectives in the study of platforms: the engineering perspective (focusing on technical aspects of platforms and capacity to lead to further innovations); the economic perspective (focusing on business models, transactions and value creation/profitability); and the sociotechnical perspective (focusing on coordination and governance issues in the platform economy ecosystem). Finally, Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie (2019) offer a useful typology that distinguishes platforms in terms of their purpose into the following three categories: (a) transaction platforms (the most well-studied) which facilitate interactions between different parties; (b) innovation platforms which constitute the basis upon which developers produce complementary innovative products and services; and (c) hybrid platforms which combine characteristics of both (Gawer and Bonina 2024).

The above typologies help us understand how and where value is supposed to be generated via platforms. Value is produced when platforms facilitate interactions and exchanges (e.g. of goods and services) between parties (consumers and suppliers) that would not otherwise be able to be connected, and matching them in appropriate ways whilst reducing or eliminating transaction costs, for instance, costs related to accessibility, miscommunication or misinformation (Gawer and Bonina 2024; Krishnan et al. 2024). Platforms also generate value as a result of the different ways in which they create and use innovations. Specifically, platforms create value by, first, selling their innovative services and products, such as apps; second, by allowing third parties to use their resources and know-how to innovate further; and finally, through advertising (Bonina et al. 2021). More critical studies have also illustrated how platforms may generate economic value in ways that are not always visible to their users (Nachtwey and Schaupp 2024). For instance, digital health platforms, offering patients a space to share peer experiences about health conditions and treatments, generate economic value (Lupton 2014, 2016; Tempini 2015) when patient data are repurposed and capitalised by platform owners for profit (Kallinikos and Tempini 2014; Tempini 2015). Further to their emphasis on economic value, digital platforms have been found to be exploitative and exclusive (Ahuja, Chan, and Krishnamurthy 2023) and to promote new forms of (digital) ‘colonialism’ (Petrakaki, Chamakiotis, and Curto-Millet 2023). Tarafdar, Page, and Marabelli (2022), for example, show how algorithms learn from human activity, generating economic or management value, often at the expense of individuals' awareness and/or without their consent. So far, the literature has largely approached value as a measurable, monetised asset, missing out on its potential to generate non-economic value and the form this takes.

We see this potential being materialised given that platforms provide, through their technical capabilities, a social space for individuals to come together and interact in the form of a community. In doing so, platforms produce social value by: (a) connecting otherwise disconnected or marginalised individuals, like, for example, the social network, MobileVaani, that connects people based in rural areas in India (Moitra, Kumar, and Seth 2018); (b) allowing individuals to access credible data, like, for example, the mPedigree platform (mPedigree n.d.), which operates in numerous African and Asian countries, that authenticates medical products in an economy where counterfeit products thrive; and (c) enabling individuals to access opportunities that would not otherwise be possible, such as to enter the labour market as is the case with Upwork (Upwork n.d.).

Some of these platforms have been explicitly developed to produce social value. For instance, the Ushahidi platform in Kenya aims to empower citizens' mobilisation and political activism and to support citizens' journalism, especially during periods of crises and sociopolitical unrest (Ameripour, Nicholson, and Newman 2010). Other platforms may contribute to social value creation whilst generating profit. This is the case with PatientsLikeMe, for example, which creates online patient communities and supports medical research whilst also serving commercial purposes (Kallinikos and Tempini 2014).

This ‘coming together’ has been found to then enable the emergence of different types of online communities. For example, MedicineAfrica, a digital platform that brings together medical professionals from the United Kingdom with medical professionals and students in the Global South (Dawood 2014), has been found to give rise to an online community, creating three forms of social value: cognitive, epistemic and professional (Chamakiotis, Petrakaki, and Panteli 2021). Although the purpose of MedicineAfrica is to educate medical professionals and students in countries of the Global South, Chamakiotis, Petrakaki, and Panteli (2021) suggest that the emergence of this type of community creates value not only for those in the Global South, but also for those based in the Global North (in this case, the United Kingdom). Specifically, the medical professionals from the United Kingdom, whose role on the platform is to provide education, are exposed to medical conditions of the Global South which are not common in the Global North, developing their professional expertise further. Similarly, given a growing interest in the IS literature in how technologies influence forced migration (e.g. AbuJarour, Chughtai, and Zheng 2024), social media platforms have been recently seen as enablers of a similar type of online/hybrid community, whereby refugees have a space to turn to for advice, information and support throughout their journeys from their country of origin to their country of destination (Chamakiotis, Aljabr, and Masiero 2022). In both cases, these platform-enabled communities are, in a way, hybrid, in that the benefits they provide extend beyond the online environment and have real-world impact that can improve people's lives. In the case of MedicineAfrica, the medical education provided through the platform leads to improved medical care in the local context where the participants of the Global South countries are based and practise medicine. In the case of refugees, whilst social media platforms serve as a source of information and as a barrier breaker while refugees are ‘on the move’, they then provide a space for refugees to come together face to face once their journeys are over and have reached their desired (final) destination.

It is not only commercial platforms like Airbnb and Uber that have been found to contribute to unjust outcomes by being exploitative or exclusive (e.g. Ahuja, Chan, and Krishnamurthy 2023). Social value too has been found to come hand in hand with unintended negative effects within the digital platform environment, including colonising effects over the communities they intend to serve (Petrakaki, Chamakiotis, and Curto-Millet 2023), work intensification (Idowu and Elbanna 2021), surveillance and reduction of freedoms (Zuboff 2019), and ‘degenerative’ outcomes causing local systems to deteriorate (Masiero and Arvidsson 2021).

Our Special Issue contributes to this emerging literature by providing a better understanding around alternative, yet un(der)explored, forms of value engendered by digital platforms, the contexts wherein this value may be generated (i.e. for whom), the mechanisms that underpin them and the wider implications of this value creation. Different types of platforms and industries in various empirical contexts are explored as we describe in the following section.

To ensure we received appropriate submissions, we encouraged interested authors to submit an extended abstract of their proposed articles a few months prior to the official submission deadline. This was an informal process whereby numerous authors emailed us their extended abstracts and we provided feedback. Thirty-five articles were then formally submitted to this Special Issue, of which 15 were desk-rejected (either by us or by the AEs to whom they were assigned), 14 were rejected after being reviewed, one article was withdrawn by the authors, and five made it into the Special Issue. In what follows, we present each accepted article and explain how it contributes to our Special Issue.

Our Special Issue opens with Ameen, Hoelscher, and Panteli's (2024) article, entitled ‘Exploring how mumpreneurs use digital platforms' algorithms and mechanisms to generate different types of value’. The authors explore how mumpreneurs, broadly seen as individuals who seek to combine motherhood with business ownership (Ekinsmyth 2011), use Instagram to generate different types of value. Through qualitative interviews with UK-based mumpreneurs, they find that different types of values, both economic and non-economic, are created over time as mumpreneurs develop increased awareness of the opportunities that the platform provides. The mechanisms enabling value creation were the platform's algorithm-driven recommendations on connectivity and the mumpreneurs' own adaptability. The study proposes a process model depicting the temporal dimension of value creation, with digital platform mechanisms enabling engagement and cognitive value in stage 1, which then lead to economic and self-preservation value in stage 2. Their study contributes to the literature by presenting a temporal dimension to value creation and by expanding our understanding of algorithms' impact on platform users and value creation. Their findings offer guidance for platform designers and mumpreneurs to maximise value creation.

In the second article, entitled ‘Governing digital platform ecosystems for social options’, Sanner et al. (2025) show how a digital platform ecosystem can be governed to enable distributed social value creation. The authors' governance model takes Frischmann's (2012) notion of social options as a guiding principle, meaning that the goal of governance is to enable common, open and generic resources that afford a wide range of social value creation. This entails enabling individual actors in the platform ecosystem to create social value contingent on and appropriate to local needs and contexts while ensuring that knowledge and innovations generated through these activities enable further social options for the ecosystem as a whole. The authors' model, based on a seven-year qualitative study of DHIS2, a digital platform primarily used in public health management, shows that governing for social options occurs through the interplay of three governance processes: resourcing, capacitating and purposing. These processes shape the governance mechanisms to enable distributed creation of social value. The strength of this article lies in showing how social value necessarily must emerge from the ecosystem. Social value creation is not created at the interaction between the platform owner and its complementors, but it emerges from local use contexts where complementors engage with user needs. The implications are that platform governance for social value needs to involve processes that are inclusive and lowers barriers to participation.

In the third article, entitled ‘Co-constructing cooperative value ecosystems: A critical realist perspective’, Zhang et al. (2025) explore digital platform cooperatives and specifically the ways in which these co-ops create social value outside the confines of profit-centric paradigms. In doing so, the authors investigate social value creation as a sociotechnical phenomenon and find that there are three main outcomes of social value creation, namely: strengthening community capacities, federating cooperative ventures and fostering practices for narrative co-creation. Yet, the main contribution of this study is specifically on the illustration of the mechanisms that give rise to these outcomes: collective identity and empowerment and government-community symbiosis. This is a significant contribution for two main reasons. First, earlier literature has primarily focused on for-profit platforms, where social value creation is typically a peripheral consideration; yet, for non-profit co-ops, social value is found at the core of their operations. This means that processes and operations between corporate and cooperative models differ considerably, and this study gives us a glimpse into an ecosystem whereby social value creation is a primary rather than an ancillary objective. The second reason that makes this a substantial contribution is that the authors showcase the need for some very specific conditions that allow digital co-ops to flourish. Namely, cooperative platforms can only be successful in creating social value when the political and institutional environment provides the necessary support and in doing so help co-ops to resist degeneration forces.

In the fourth article, ‘Leveraging digital tools to foster resilience in the Charity sector: The case of eBay's Charity Connect initiative’, Richey, Brooks, and Ravishankar (2025) examine the role of platforms in sustaining a crucially significant sector amid sudden disruption and chronic government cuts. The charity (non-profit) sector, rarely featured in IS studies, is well-known for generating tremendous economic and social benefits from a limited resource base. Using Conservation of Resources Theory, the authors elaborate the complex decisions facing charities trying to adopt eBay's platform to survive COVID-19-related lockdowns, and the different pathways to greater resilience enabled by the support initiative. The article foregrounds the question of how value-generating activities might be sustained with the help of platforms. The authors also highlight the importance of considering value-generation and platform support initiatives in context; seemingly small contributions from eBay's initiative were immensely meaningful to the charities. The case study adds to the Special Issue by offering a reminder that value creation takes place in increasingly demanding, precarious circumstances which demand resilience.

In the fifth and final article, ‘Navigating tensions between Indigeneity and social media participation: A case study of the Guarani community in South America’, Smailhodzic et al. (2025) take the case of the Guarani community in South America and apply a two-eyed seeing approach to study value creation through the Indigenous community's use of social media platforms. Their study reveals that, on the one hand, the community's engagement with social media provides unprecedented opportunities for them and their values which are centred around their ways of living and the protection of the natural environment. On the other hand, however, this is found to lead to three types of tensions: detachment, exposure and exploitation. The authors add to our Special Issue by explaining how social media platforms contribute to the generation of social and environmental value in the Indigenous context and how the Indigenous community navigates the subsequent challenges. They find that the community benefits from value appropriation through engagement with content available on social media platforms which enables them to stay connected with their friends and family elsewhere, but also to learn about the outside world; and contributes to value generation for the outside world by providing information about their ways of living and nature that challenges stereotypes and fights prejudice.

The five articles published in our Special Issue advance the current state of the art in the area of digital platforms by offering an updated understanding of the different forms of value associated with digital platforms. The Special Issue covers a range of platforms: social media platforms; a public health platform and digital platform cooperatives; and an e-commerce platform in different regions. In Table 1, we present the types of platforms that the five articles in the Special Issue examine and the regions in which the respective studies were conducted.

Several conclusions emerge from this Special Issue concerning the how, the what, the when and the where of value creation on platforms. First, the non-economic value that platforms may create is conditional and should not be taken for granted. It depends on a range of sociotechnical factors and specifically, as the articles demonstrated: (a) platforms' technological affordances, such as connectivity; (b) users' personal and collective characteristics, such as appropriation, adaptability and development of a collective identity; and (c) platform governance mechanisms that enable a broad platform scope, permit identification of social options and align platform outputs with local values.

Second, various types of non-economic value emerge from platforms: opportunities for engagement with businesses as well as local communities; learning opportunities and building of professional identity; strengthening of community capacities; opportunities for cooperative ventures and development of communal resilience especially in the cases of crises; and platform appropriation to promote local values and fight issues of prejudice.

Third, our Special Issue indicates that the value digital platforms generate is characterised by an element of temporality. Time is significant in terms of defining the type of value that emerges and its benefits and broader effects. Richey, Brooks, and Ravishankar (2025) demonstrate the temporality of digital resilience as an outcome of platforms in the non-profit sector and so the extent to which resilience can last beyond the immediate period of a crisis. Time also affects the type of value that is created and experienced by beneficiaries, indicating that value takes time to be developed and perceived by individuals and their communities (Ameen, Hoelscher, and Panteli 2024).

Finally, the articles illustrate some important findings around the location in which value gets generated. Ameen, Hoelscher, and Panteli (2024) show that non-economic value is created as a part of the interactions that take place on the platform by mumpreueners. Sanner et al. (2025) position value creation within the ecosystem that surrounds the platform. In this case, value emerges more broadly from the overall environment within which the platform is situated and governed. Two articles, by Zhang et al. (2025) and Richey, Brooks, and Ravishankar (2025), take an inward-looking perspective in showing that value is embedded in the platform; it is thus associated with the purposes that drive the platform's function, as is the case, for example, with charities and co-operatives. Smailhodzic et al. (2025) offer an alternative perspective, suggesting that the value of the platform lies with the recipient community, organisation or individuals, in their case, the Indigenous community and the ways in which they used the platform to meet their needs whilst maintaining their traditional ways of living.

Although the above suggestions revolve around platforms, there exist opportunities to explore the potential of other types of digital technologies, not necessarily platforms, to create value. On the one hand, an evident focus could be on newer technologies such as Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) systems which undeniably come with unprecedented (social) benefits and challenges of multidisciplinary importance (e.g. Ooi et al. 2023). On the other hand, as we have seen in our Special Issue, the importance of context and methodological choice matters. Consequently, we encourage researchers to focus on non-mainstream empirical contexts, like some of the authors in this Special Issue have done (e.g. Richey, Brooks, and Ravishankar 2025; Smailhodzic et al. 2025), as well as other underexplored empirical contexts (such as the Global South; e.g. Chamakiotis, Petrakaki, and Panteli 2021); and to make alternative, even ‘unpopular’ methodological choices that could generate data not typically accessible via traditional research methods (e.g. video and other digital methods; Symon, Pritchard, and Hine 2022; Whiting et al. 2018).

In closing, although our primary readership here are academics and our Special Issue has generated theoretically fresh insights, our Special Issue could be of value to practitioners, platform designers, policy makers, educators, entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals and students, among others who might engage with platforms in different ways.