Towards a Socio-Cognitive View on Digital Platform Firms: An Organizational Identity Perspective

Abstract

In this paper we induce novel theory on the idiosyncratic nature and consequences of organizational identity in digital platform firms—i.e., intermediaries enabling interaction between market sides—such as Uber or Airbnb. Specifically, based on an inductive multi-case study, we distill four archetypes of organizational identities of digital platform firms, characterized by organization members’ idiosyncratic construals of their firm’s domain identity, i.e., traditional or transformative, and role identity, i.e., facilitator or connector, respectively: traditional facilitator, transformative facilitator, traditional connector, and transformative connector. We further induce nomological propositions as to how identity-infused patterns of interpretation render these firms to differ regarding their predominant multi-sided customer understanding and organizational structure as well as the openness of their platform design. Overall, we contribute by introducing a socio-cognitive perspective of digital platform firms, which enhances and challenges the so far predominantly transactional view on this central phenomenon of the digital economy, and show how this perspective opens up new ways to describe and explain differences between digital platforms. In particular, our organizational identity lens and thereon based theoretical framework provide hitherto unexplored cues into explaining interfirm variance in central elements of digital platform structure and patterns of behavior. Keywords: Digital platform; digital transformation; ecosystem; organizational identity; multi-sided market