cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/73100852

Our analysis contributes to ongoing debates on digital platforms, in particular from an institutional perspective, in the following ways. First, research on platforms has established a critical distinction between the organization of the platform host organization and the organization of the ‘crowd’ - the users who interact in digital action spaces (e.g., Ametowobla and Kirchner, 2023; Bauer and Gegenhuber, 2015; Dolata and Schrape, 2023). However, less attention has been paid to how certain features of platform organization such as centralized algorithmic control, data extraction mechanisms, and proprietary governance structures (e.g., Stark and Pais, 2020; Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal, 2018) shape the public arena. Given that, in the case of social media platforms, the crowd comprises a large part of society, we demonstrate how the selective appropriation of institutional logics in the governance of platforms simultaneously subverts these logics in the public sphere.

Second, we highlight that these effects reflect strategic choices rather than technological inevitability, because platforms rhetorically appeal to the logics of the market, the corporation and the community to gain legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), while diverging from these logics in the actual practices in which they create, regulate and monetize digital marketplaces. As an outlook, we point to alternative forms of platform organization more in line with liberal, democratic principles - while indicating a need to reform democratic societies away from a market towards a commons-based orientation (e.g. Etzioni, 2000, Etzioni, 2009). Social media platforms structured around decentralization rather than centralized control could lead to different dynamics in the public sphere and foster logics diversity (Almandoz and Thornton, 2025), granting communities more autonomy over content curation and moderation standards, enabling democratic deliberation rather than polarization, and allowing for distributed governance rather than proprietary control. In this sense, social media platforms and contestation around their governance constitute non-neutral battlegrounds where societal logics collide, are challenged, and can be transformed - in different directions.

The digital transformation can be seen as “the combined effects of several digital innovations bringing about novel actors (and actor constellations), structures, practices, values, and beliefs that change, threaten, replace or complement existing rules of the game within organizations and fields” (Hinings, Gegenhuber, and Greenwood, 2018: 53). Digital platforms can be seen as a constitutive feature of late digital society, and terms such as platform economy (Kenney and Zysman, 2016) or platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017; Staab, 2019) indicate a broader societal and economic transformation associated with the spread of platform organizations. In a platform-mediated society, economic as well as social processes are shaped by globally operating platform companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft, leading to the commodification of both private and public exchanges (Dolata, 2019; Van Dijck et al., 2018). This development not only marks the endpoint of the ‘organization society’ that Pfeffer (1997) described in the introductory quote (Davis, 2016), but undermines democratic principles because an algorithmically governed social order creates new participation possibilities, while restricting participation in decision-making (Stalder, 2016). Users on most platforms have limited to no control over the conditions under which they work (e.g., Maric, Schuessler, and Thäter, 2025).

Digital platforms are commonly defined as technology-enabled infrastructures operated by host organizations to facilitate the exchange between providers and consumers of goods, services, or knowledge (Gawer, 2010). It is important to distinguish the platform host organization - typically a rather small, formal organization often embedded in multinational technology companies - from structures and practices of platform organizing, which shape the dynamics of market, crowd or community transactions (Bauer and Gegenhuber, 2015; Kirchner and Schuessler, 2019; Langner and Seidel, 2015). Dolata and Schrape (2023) hence distinguish the platform-operating companies from the technologically mediated social action space that is typically referred to as the ‘platform’ (similarly Ametowobla and Kirchner, 2023). While initially narratives about sharing, autonomy, flexibility, openness, fluidity, and peer production accompanied the rise of the platform organization, dominant narratives now emphasize data extraction and processing, algorithmic governance, surveillance, social stratification (Fourcade, 2021; Healy, Nicholson, and Pekarek, 2017; Zuboff, 2018) as well as platform domination, power, centralization and control (Seemann, 2021; Kenney, Bearson, and Zysman, 2021; Schuessler, Attwood-Charles, Kirchner, and Schor, 2021). Platform governance is often described as ‘hybrid’, because it uses market, corporation and community mechanisms to coordinate crowds via a digital infrastructure (e.g. Kornberger, 2016; Zhang et al., 2024).

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Our study contributes to ongoing debates on digital platforms and institutional logics in several ways. First, by shifting our analysis
from gig work platforms operating on a national or field-level to globally operating social media platforms, we show how platforms'
hybrid use of institutional logics (Frenken et al., 2020; Grabher and K¨onig, 2020; Watkins and Stark, 2018; Zhang et al., 2025) has
repercussions for the public sphere. Hence, we support critical analyses of platforms' regulatory power (e.g. Lehdonvirta, 2022),
complementing these analyses with an organization-theoretical perspective that shows how the governance of the platform host or-
ganization extends to the ways in which platforms organize crowds, yielding them significant power to play with and undermine
societal-level institutional logics given their influence over the public sphere.

Second, we respond to recent calls for using the institutional logics framework to understand current challenges to the liberal-
capitalist, democratic institutional order (Lounsbury and Wang, 2020), revealing the role played by certain kinds of platforms in
undermining its institutional pillars. While symbolically adopting the rhetoric of the logic of the market, the corporation and the
community to gain legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), large, centralized and profit-driven social media platforms decompose the
means and ends of these logics in the specific ways in which they create, regulate and monetize markets (Yan et al., 2021), thereby
redefining not just the composition of dominant logics in society, but also their meanings and associated practices (Schildt and Kodeih,
2025). Arguably, platforms' strategic and subversive use of institutional logics is possible and impactful because users lack situated
interaction possibilities in digital spaces. Such interactions are an important source of resistance to a manipulative use of institutional
logics, because they allow detecting and acting upon a lack of coherence in logics (Zilber, 2024).

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