Digital Battlegrounds: The Power Dynamics and Governance of Contemporary Platforms

The ubiquity of digital platforms is undeniable, as is their transactional efficiency and world-flattening possibilities. Yet, these platforms are contested battlegrounds where stakeholder power struggles reflect and influence broader societal turbulence. In the emerging era, alongside the blinding speed and global reach of the gig economy are looming specters of rentier capitalism, digi-serfdom, misinformation, data exploitation, digital addiction, and near-ungovernable algorithmic agents. To date, scholarly focus on digital platforms has been on their transactional features and impacts, dimensionalizing governance mechanisms as emanating from old economy conceptions of bottom-up or top-down checks and balances, or incentives and efficiencies. These emphases, while useful for understanding managerial control of digital platforms, largely ignore the extent to which digital platforms are contested organizational spaces, shaped by complex power dynamics. Foucault (1998: 63) asserted that power is everywhere, and that those who hold power are rarely well-understood by those who are subject to it. In seeking to rebalance and reorient digital platform research, we analyze and integrate existing research along four dimensions that shape platform power dynamics: actors, relations, faces, and struggle. We establish a future research agenda—including six testable propositions—that more thoroughly engages the critical, yet untapped, expertise of management scholars concerning platform power.