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This work examines the intersection between traditional human resource management and the novel employment arrangements of the expanding gig economy. While there is a substantial multidisciplinary literature on the digital platform labor phenomenon, it has been largely centered on the experiences of gig workers. As digital labor platforms continue to grow and specialize, more managers, executives, and human resource practitioners will need to make decisions about whether and how to utilize gig workers. Here the authors explore and interrogate the unique features of human resource management (HRM) activities in the context of digital labor platforms. The authors discuss challenges and opportunities regarding (1) HRM in organizations that outsource labor needs to external labor platforms, (2) HRM functions within digital labor platform firms, and (3) HRM policies and practices for organizations that develop their own spin-off digital labor platform. To foster a more nuanced understanding of work in the gig economy, the authors identify common themes across these contexts, highlight knowledge gaps, offer recommendations for future research, and outline pathways for collecting empirical data on HRM in the gig economy.

The attempt to establish a common European framework for core platforms' duties and responsibilities toward other actors in the digital environment is at the core of the recent scholarly debate surrounding the Digital Markets Act (DMA) proposal. In particular, the everlasting juxtaposition between the “data power” – as emerging from recent cases (Section 2) – that dominant tech companies enjoy and the concept of consumer sovereignty (Section 3) lies at the core of the proposal's attempt to identify digital core platforms as market gatekeepers. Accordingly, this chapter critically investigates the divide between power imbalance and consumer sovereignty in light of the architecture designed by the DMA, with a specific focus on its effectiveness in identifying gatekeepers' power drivers (Section 4). After highlighting the main critical aspects of the pertinent rules, opportunities for fruitful developments are then identified through the reframing of some of the notions considered in the proposal, and namely the role of “lock-in” effects and “data accumulation” (Section 5). Lastly, this chapter suggests that the DMA advancements – while desirable – are bound to be fragmentary in the absence of a wider appraisal of the nature of data power imbalance dynamics in the modern digital markets (Section 6).

The digital transformation calls for new thinking about sociotechnical systems design (STSD) because it has enabled new kinds of work systems to proliferate. We identify a new class of sociotechnical system, called the Platform-STS (P-STS), which complements the existing Industrial- and Knowledge-STSs. The P-STS has distinctive characteristics compared to the other classes because it reaches directly into ecosystems and is, therefore, “distributed,” and because it is governed through market mechanisms rather than hierarchy or clan mechanisms. We introduce a new design principle, redundancy of connectivity, to ground design thinking about the P-STS. We demonstrate why fundamental STSD principles need to be reconfigured, suggest how they might do so, and conclude that socioecological designs and interventions may need to supplant sociotechnical ones.

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.”

In this chapter, we connect our focus — the organizing of marketing — to one of the strongest drivers for its change — digitalization — and draw attention to various “dual forces” that affect marketing as a consequence. These dual forces are associated with the concept of ambidexterity. Given that companies today are affected by digitalization, both internally in their organizations and in their external business relations, and that they need to act as ambidextrous organizations handling both old (“analog”) and new (“digital”) situations, how does this affect marketing, in general, and the organizing of marketing, in particular?

The chapter will be founded on the assumptions that digitalization is a central driver of change in business and society today, and this digitalization requires organizations to explore new opportunities while still operating with mature technologies in mature markets. Marketing most often has a central role in this situation of digitalization. The connection between digitalization processes, ambidextrous organizations, and the processes of organizing marketing is the focus of this chapter.

The subject is wide, and the aim of the chapter is to generate ideas on some potential consequences for marketing management and organization. The chapter ends with a set of propositions serving as starting points for further studies of the links between digitalization, marketing management and organization, as well as the forces resulting from digitalization.

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.

The purpose of the chapter is to overview the sociological literature related to social media and digital technologies in sport, with particular attention to media representations, content production, and audience responses. The chapter examines how social media and digital technologies reproduce and challenge hegemonic representation strategies, while maintaining existing cultural norms in the industry. Further, the chapter evaluates how athletes and fans create digital communities to bring visibility to marginalized groups. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of digital media for social justice and advocacy.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature in sociology of sport, sport communication, and media studies to provide an assessment of the implications of social media and digital technologies for sport.

Scholarship on social media and digital technologies in sport has primarily focused on descriptive analyses. Sociological approaches provide a theoretical grounding for examining issues of power, inequality, and social justice in relation to media ideologies, production, and consumption.

The chapter identifies future areas of study, including a more robust engagement with theory and an expansion of methodological approaches.

The chapter provides an overview of the literature on social media and digital technologies in sport of nearly 80 scholarly publications. The chapter moves beyond focusing on patterns in content to consider how structures, journalistic practices, cultural norms, and audience interactions collectively shape ideologies about gender, race, sexuality, religion, and disability in the sport media industry.

The increasing use of digital technologies in organizational contexts, like collaborative social platforms, has not only changed the way people work but also provided organizations with new and wide ranges of data sources that could be analyzed to enhance organizational- and individual-level outcomes, especially when integrated with more traditional tools. In this study, we explore the relationship between data flows generated by employees on companies’ digital environments and employees’ attitudes measured through surveys. In a sample of 107 employees, we collected data on the number and types of actions performed on the company’s digital collaborative platform over a two-year period and the level of organizational embeddedness (fit, sacrifice, and links dimensions) through two rounds of surveys over the same period. The correlation of the quantity and quality of digital actions with the variation of organizational embeddedness over the same period shows that workers who engaged in more activities on the digital platform also experienced an increase in their level of organizational embeddedness mainly in the fit dimension. In addition, the higher the positive variation of fit, the more employees performed both active and passive digital actions. Finally, the higher the variation of organizational embeddedness, the more employees performed networking digital behaviors.