Platform capture: a review of the state of the art of research on platforms and a research agenda

Abstract

Platforms are polysemic market objects that structure – and are structured by – markets. In this article, I provide an overview of research on platforms in the field of marketing and elsewhere. First, I discuss how infrastructures, governance, and institutional logics make up and sustain platforms in a synergetic fashion. Then, I identify five key domains that platforms have captured: human-object relationships, interpersonal relationships, money, labour, and public goods. Building on these categorisations, I provide an analytical grid for scholars to bring clarity to the polysemic nature of platforms and reorient how they ask questions about platforms. I conclude with a discussion on how we should rethink the boundaries of marketing and consumption studies as platforms increasingly engulf everyday life.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.