Martín Harraca
Academic and research departments
Centre of Digital Economy, Department of Digital Economy, Entrepreneurship and Innovation.About
My research project
Power in digital platforms and the transformation of managerial practicesDigital platforms have proven to be highly disruptive in our societies creating new markets, leading innovation, and becoming central economic actors. With an increasing number of longstanding firms gradually adopting this type of structure, management scholars’ interest on them has increased, with some voices starting to conceptualize them as new organizational forms with fluid or fuzzy boundaries.
This research seeks to expand the theory by understanding specific power mechanisms in fuzzy or boundaryless digitally-enabled organizations, and how this impacts managerial practices.
Supervisors
Digital platforms have proven to be highly disruptive in our societies creating new markets, leading innovation, and becoming central economic actors. With an increasing number of longstanding firms gradually adopting this type of structure, management scholars’ interest on them has increased, with some voices starting to conceptualize them as new organizational forms with fluid or fuzzy boundaries. This research seeks to expand the theory by understanding specific power mechanisms in fuzzy or boundaryless digitally-enabled organizations, and how this impacts managerial practices.
Publications
The power of the digital platforms and the increasing scope of their control over individuals and institutions have begun to generate societal concern. However, the ways in which digital platforms exercise power and organize immaturity—defined as the erosion of the individual’s capacity for public use of reason—have not yet been theorized sufficiently. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capitals, and habitus, we take a socio-symbolic perspective on platforms’ power dynamics, characterizing the digital habitus and identifying specific forms of platform power and counter-power accumulation. We make two main contributions. First, we expand the concept of organized immaturity by adopting a sociological perspective, from which we develop a novel socio-symbolic view of platforms’ power dynamics. Our framework explains fundamental aspects of immaturity, such as self-infliction and emergence. Second, we contribute to the platform literature by developing a three-phase model of platform power dynamics over time.