Against the backdrop of ongoing public and political debates about the power and regulation of large platform conglomerates, this special issue calls for more critical, conceptual, and empirical studies on platform power. While a lot of valuable research has already been done, we see a tendency...

This article addresses the problem of platform power by probing current regulatory frameworks' basic assumptions about how tech firms operate in digital ecosystems. Platform power is generally assessed in terms of economic markets in which individual corporate actors harness technological...

This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept of platformisation. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms—software studies, critical political economy, business studies, and cultural studies—it develops a comprehensive approach to this...

This chapter discusses how the intensive use of social media transforms the organization and communication of protest. The starting point of this discussion is to question the idea that traditional modes of organization in social movements (with structural features like identifiable leaders and...

Since 2012, platforms for massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX, have had a considerable impact on established forms of higher education, both online and off-line, private and public. What are the technocommercial and sociocultural dynamics underlying the...

Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the...

Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mech­anics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the...

The United Kingdom has been a leader in the open data movement – a new movement by governments around the world to open up the vast repositories of data they hold across agencies and departments, and to collect new kinds of data for public use. Open data is publicly available data that can be...