Constitutive Regulation as a Compromise for Disruptive Innovation?

This article explores how constitutive regulation can function as a response to disruptive innovation, using the French platform regulator ARPE as a case study. While most regulatory approaches to the platform economy rely on adapting existing legal categories, ARPE introduces a novel model based on the creation of new institutional identities and behaviours. Drawing on abductive document analysis, the article examines how constitutive regulation attempts to reconcile the demands of both platform firms and workers by creating new participatory mechanisms without altering independent status of platform workers It critically assesses the partially decommodifying ambitions of this model within the recommodifying pressures of digital capitalism and contributes to theoretical debates on the role of regulation in shaping technological and social transformation.