The Disruption Delusion: Machines, Networks, and the Platformization of Industrial Production

“Disruption!” — eulogized the business literature and heralded yet another epochal shift in capitalist development: the relational governance that had given shape to the network society was dethroned by a novel mode of algorithmic governance that ushered in the new phase of platform capitalism. These sweeping generalizations, however, stand in stark contrast to the selectivity of the research on which these claims are based. Celebrating Uber and Airbnb as standard bearers of this new epoch, pertinent research primarily focused on the consumer- and communication-based internet — at least, so far. This paper seeks to contribute to the ever-growing body of research that accumulates compelling evidence for the distinctive realities of platforms in the realm of production. Rather than by a new breed of digital-native disruptors (that rapidly scale to monopolists), the development of platforms in the industrial realm is driven by incumbent manufacturing oligopolists. By engaging with the key tenets of consumer platform research (asset-light business model; network effects; frictionless scalability; algorithmic governance), the transformation of John Deere (the leading manufacturer of agricultural equipment) shall reveal this: instead of a categorical shift to a sharply delineated novel form, the trajectory from the provider of stand-alone physical products to the orchestrator of a digital-physical ecosystem amounts to a messy and tenacious process of variation and hybridization.