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 the United Specifically, the medical professionals from the United whose role on the platform is to provide education, are to medical conditions of the Global South which are not in the Global North, developing their professional Similarly, given a in the IS literature in how technologies (e.g. and social platforms have been as of a type of community, have a space to to for and support their from their of to their of (Chamakiotis, and In both these communities in a in that the benefits they provide beyond the online and have impact that can improve In the case of MedicineAfrica, the medical education provided through the platform to medical in the local context where the of the Global South countries are based and In the case of whilst social platforms as a of and as a are the they then provide a space for to come together to their are and have their is not only commercial platforms Airbnb and that have been found to contribute to by being exploitative or exclusive (e.g. Chan, and Krishnamurthy 2023). value has been found to come hand in hand with effects within the digital platform including effects the communities they to (Petrakaki, Chamakiotis, and Curto-Millet intensification and Elbanna 2021), surveillance and of 2019), and local systems to and 2021). 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