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The paper argues that the classical Marxist theory of capitalist accumulation is inadequate to understand new forms of capitalism and their accumulation processes determined by “platforms” and “big data”. Big data platforms are shaping the processes of production, labour, the price of products and market conditions. “Digital platforms” and “big data” have become an integral part of the processes of production, distribution and exchange relations. These twin pillars are central to the capitalist accumulation processes. The article argues that the classical Marxist theory of capitalist accumulation is inadequate to understand new forms of capitalism and their accumulation processes determined by “platforms” and “big data”.

As a conceptual paper, this paper follows critical methodological lineages and traditions based on non-linear historical narratives around the conceptualisation, construction and transition of the “Marxist theory of capital accumulation” in the age of platform economy. This paper follows a discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) to locate the way in which an artificial intelligence (AI)-led platform economy helps identify and conceptualise new forms of capitalist accumulation. It engages with Jørgensen and Phillips' (2002) contextual and empirical discursive traditions to undertake a qualitative comparative analysis by exploring a broad range of complex factors with case studies and examples from leading firms within the platform economy. Finally, it adopts two steps of “Theory Synthesis and Theory Adaptation” as outlined by Jaakkola (2020) to synthesise, adopt and expand the Marxist theory of capital accumulation under platform capitalism.

This article identifies new trends and forms of data driven capitalist accumulation processes within the platform capitalism. The findings suggest that an AI led platform economy creates new forms of capitalist accumulation. The article helps to develop theoretical understanding and conceptual frameworks to understand and explain these new forms of capital accumulation.

This study builds upon the limited theorisation on the AI and new capitalist accumulation processes. This article identifies new trends and forms of data driven capitalist accumulation processes within platform capitalism. The article helps to understand digital and platform capitalisms in the lens of digital labour and expands the theory of capitalist accumulation and its new forms in the age of datafication. While critiquing the Marxist theory of capitalist accumulation, the article offers alternative approaches for the future.

This chapter examines how darknet drug marketplaces operate within platform capitalism. While capitalist power relations remain underexplored in research on digital drug markets, the analysis shows that the basic foundation of cryptomarkets relies on the infrastructure of platform capitalism. The authors use the concept of platform capitalism to explore cryptomarkets in an ideology-critical way. Platforms are infrastructure for the mediation of buyers and vendors; however, they are designed to extract data on the activities of their users. Platform capitalism refers to the process by which the vast collection of user data feeds into the accumulation of capital. The authors use a dialectical method to examine the constellation of digital drug platforms by disclosing a threefold contradiction: state control and self-regulation; visibility and concealment; and legality and illegality. The analysis reveals that darknet drug platforms make a profit not only from the trade of illicit drugs and the collection of user data, but also based on the illegal status of drugs, the associated ideology, and the closed ecology of darknet platforms. Power relations in cryptomarkets thereby mimic those observed in platform capitalism in general. Finally, the authors discuss the implications of platform capitalism for online drug markets.

Do digital technologies of early 21st century capitalism promote or reduce consumer sovereignty? This chapter addresses this question by examining John Kenneth Galbraith’s critique of consumer sovereignty during the post-war period of industrial society and looks at the insights he provides to understand the impact of platform capitalism on consumer sovereignty today. This chapter has the following sections: (1) I review the main postulates of Galbraith’s theory; (2) I highlight the main differences between traditional advertising and online behavioral advertising; (3) I explain how online behavioral advertisement strengthens Galbraith’s dependence effect and revised sequence theories; (4) I then discuss normative challenges raised by digital platform corporations to individual sovereignty; and (5) finally, I argue that platform capitalism is a mature form of Galbraith’s “new industrial state.”

This chapter explores the disruptive potential of the Internet to transform illicit drug markets while also challenging stereotypical depictions and superficial understandings of supply and demand. It argues that the digital transformation of illicit drug markets combines, on one hand, a reconfiguration of the scope and impact of how sellers, buyers, and other actors interact within and upon digitally mediated retail drug markets and, on the other hand, continuing trends in the embeddedness of market structures in cultural, economic, political, and legal realms. We develop conceptual ideas for studying the architecture of digital drug markets by drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to digitalisation, markets, and drugs. To understand the functioning of online drug markets, we first need to understand digitalisation. Thus, we draw on scholarship on the digital transformation of society and, second, put forward an understanding of markets that considers how personal relations and social structures enhance and restrict market exchange. Thus, we draw on economic sociology. Third, we build on and extend social science research on illicit drug markets which points out that drug markets exhibit significant variations over time and across jurisdictions. The introduction aims to provide a research agenda that can help us to explore ongoing digital transformations of illicit drug markets. It expands and deepens scholarship on the technological, structural, economic, and cultural factors underlying the resilience and growth of digital drug markets. It also goes beyond a concern with just one type of digital drug market into wider forms of digital environments.

The author analyses the strategies developed by workers and unions to obtain representation and the successes and limitations of the strategies, in a context of platform work such as Spanish dominated by labour relations of employee workers.

The empirical material is the result of a series of in-depth interviews conducted between August 2020 and September 2021 with 41 workers, 15 of them union delegates, in addition to 4 union members and a labour lawyer. From these interviews, the author obtains a detailed account of the working conditions and the different phases that unionism has gone through in its objective of obtaining representation in a completely new sector.

The author found that employment in the relationship does not solve all the problems of platform work, especially those related to algorithmic control, but employment in the relationship provides advantages such as the right to representation. Workers play an important role in union strategies.

This study is the first in Spain, where platform work in passenger transport includes the employment relationship as a legal contracting mechanism.

The study aims to take a step back and take the big picture of how digital capitalism is changing people's ways of living and production. On that basis, China should enhance its digital governance rationally and develop the digital economy efficiently, thereby bringing its socialist economy to new heights.

The rise of digital capitalism in the 1990s has profoundly changed the ways of consumption, employment, production organization and investment in the realm of capitalism.

Digital Capitalism has not changed the nature of capitalism, that is, exploitation and capital accumulation, which continue only in a more profound, extensive and covert way.

For the economy of socialist China to grow in the new era, China should tap into digital economy platforms, take a people-centered approach and let the people jointly develop the digital economy, share the fruits of development and participate in the governance of the digital economy. The government should leverage its modern digital governance and a high-quality digital economy to meet people's ever-growing demand for a better life.

Despite the popularity of gig employment amid the changing business landscape, gig scholarship is somewhat limited and the untold reality about gig is yet to be fully revealed. This study aims to critically address the nature of gig employment, its ambiguities, evolution, theoretical premises and the appropriate future road ahead.

This paper adopts a dual analytical approach – bibliometric and thematic analyses. After incorporating the exclusion–inclusion criteria, the authors identified 2,135 articles for the bibliometric analyses by using VOSviewer. Additionally, for the deep-delving synthesis, the authors conducted thematic analyses following Braun and Clarke (2006), based on 351 papers.

The findings revealed that gig work, in its different forms, is emerging as an alternative work arrangement with respect to the future of work. This study also identified multilevel perspectives of gig employment along with its holistic nomological network. Finally, this study offers some critical research directions that should help enhance the theoretical and practical strengths of this nascent scholarship in future.

The review findings are limited in nature owing to the paucity of quality research papers published in the said domain.

The paper brings more clarity to what gig is and isn’t, along with its critical perspectives from multilevel lenses.

This paper identifies critical perspectives related to gig work and suggests appropriate directions for future gig work related scholarship.

A growing body of research finds that gig economy platforms use gamification to enhance managerial control. Focusing on technologically mediated forms of gamification, this literature reveals how platforms mobilize gig workers’ work effort by making the labour process resemble a game. This chapter contends that this tech-centric scholarship fails to fully capture the historical continuities between contemporary and much older occurrences of game-playing at work. Informed by interviews and participatory observations at two food delivery platforms in Amsterdam, I document how these platforms’ piece wage system gives rise to a workplace dynamic in which severely underpaid delivery couriers continuously employ game strategies to maximize their gig income. Reminiscent of observations from the early shop floor ethnographies of the manufacturing industry, I show that the game of gig income maximization operates as an indirect modality of control by (re)aligning the interests of couriers with the interests of capital and by individualizing and depoliticizing couriers’ overall low wage level. I argue that the new, algorithmic technologies expand and intensify the much older forms of gamified control by infusing the organizational activities of shift and task allocation with the logic of the piece wage game and by increasing the possibilities for interaction, direct feedback and immersion. My study contributes to the literature on gamification in the gig economy by interweaving it with the classic observations derived from the manufacturing industry and by developing a conceptualization of gamification in which both capital and labour exercise agency.

This article aims to examine the impact of multiple suppliers on competitive advantage by exploiting digital capabilities.

The author propose a structural equation model with the adopted measure from the literature. Hence, the study conducted an online survey in Indonesia with 450 qualified respondents involving managers and owner-managers.

The results indicate multiple suppliers help the firms to exploit digital capabilities, which foster them to achieve competitive advantage. Hence, different level of market turbulences determines the impact of numerous suppliers on competitive advantage. Specifically, the multiple-suppliers approach is more effective in supporting buyer firms to gain a competitive advantage during high market turbulence than low market turbulence.

This study offers empirical evidence with unit analysis of buyer firms that seek competitive advantage by exploiting digital capability. However, this approach focusses on a single unit analysis, which is buyer firms. Hence, there is an opportunity to adopt qualitative approach to explore the suppliers and end-users from different perspectives from other supply chain players.

This article contributes to the growing literature on the resource-based theory by examining the relationship between the multiple-sourcing model and competitive advantage. The authors also discuss the intersection between resource-based, dynamic capability and stakeholder theory.

The purpose of this article is to examine Cairo's master plans during the past 70 years, including the establishment of the New Administrative Capital City—which is based on two fundamental courses on the phenomenon of urbanisation—and other initiatives to address Cairo's Plans based on the thoughts of three planning schools—Chicago, Los Angeles and Liverpool. The aim is to determine if the right time to relocate Egypt's capital to a different place makes sense.

Cairo has experienced significant urban challenges throughout its millennial history due to the continually shifting socioeconomic and political changes. This research uses prospective and retrospective methods to examine how planning theories have historically influenced building Cairo’s urban fabric and provides insight into the city’s master plans from the July Revolution of 1952.

It is assumed that Cairo's socio-spatial transitions over time were caused by scattered expansion, leading to contemporary Cairo's socio-spatial evolution. The paper ends with some questions about the future of the city. Should planning policies change to cope with socioeconomic, spatial and political transitions?

The article's significance stems from the necessity of adaptable and considerate ideas that move Cairo's communities towards a better setting and provide a crucial route for enhancing their environments. Using digital technologies to implement new capital while creating platform urbanism may be accomplished even with constrained budgets and short course lengths.