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A meaning-making perspective on digital ridesharing platforms in underdeveloped markets

Karen Amissah (Aston Business School, College of Business and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK)
David Sarpong (Aston Business School, College of Business and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK)
Derrick Boakye (Aston Business School, College of Business and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK)
David John Carrington (Aston Business School, College of Business and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK)

International Marketing Review

ISSN: 0265-1335

Article publication date: 8 July 2024

Issue publication date: 1 October 2024

355

Abstract

Purpose

The digital platform-based sharing economy has become ubiquitous all over the world. In this paper, we explore how market actors’ conflicting interpretations of digital platforms’ business models give form and shape value co-creation and capture practices in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets.

Design/methodology/approach

Integrating insights from the broader literature on digital platforms and the contemporary turn to “meaning-making” in social theory, we adopt a problematization method to unpack the collective contest over the interpretation of value co-creation and capture from ridesharing platforms in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets.

Findings

Collective contest over the interpretation of digital business models may give rise to competing meanings that may enable (or impede) digital platform providers’ ability to co-create and capture value. We present an integrative framework that delineates how firms caught up in such collective contests in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets may utilise such conditions as marketing resources to reset their organising logic in ways that reconcile the conflicting perspectives.

Practical implications

The paper presents propositions constituting a contribution to a meaning-making perspective on ridesharing digital platforms by offering insights into how digital business models could potentially be localised and adapted to address and align with the peculiarities of contexts. It goes further to present a theoretical model to extend our understanding of the different sources of contestation of meaning of digital platforms.

Originality/value

The meaning-making perspective on digital platforms extends our understanding of how the collective contest over interpretations of value co-creation and capture may offer a set of contradictory frames that yield possibilities for ridesharing platform providers, and their users, to assimilate the organising logic of digital business models into new categories of understanding.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their clear and critical suggestions. Additionally, we are grateful to the Aston Business School for providing the financial support for this project through the Aston Doctoral Studentship programme.

Citation

Amissah, K., Sarpong, D., Boakye, D. and Carrington, D.J. (2024), "A meaning-making perspective on digital ridesharing platforms in underdeveloped markets", International Marketing Review, Vol. 41 No. 5, pp. 911-937. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMR-08-2023-0193

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited

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