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Digital platforms, such as Amazon, represent the major beneficiaries of the Covid‐19 crisis. This study examines the role of digital platforms and their engagement in digitalisation initiatives targeting (small) brick‐and‐mortar retailers in Germany, thereby contributing to a better understanding of how digital platforms augment, substitute or reorganise physical retail spaces. This study applies a mixed‐method approach based on qualitative interviews, participant observation as well as media analysis. First, the study illustrates the controversial role of digital platforms by positioning themselves as supporting partners of the (offline) retailers, while simultaneously shifting power towards the platforms themselves. Second, digital platforms have established themselves not only as infrastructure providers but also as actors within these infrastructures, framing digital as well as physical retail spaces, inter alia due to their role as publicly legitimised retail advisers. Third, while institutions want to help retailers to survive, they simultaneously enhance retailers' dependency on digital platforms.
Strategies in Times of Pandemic Crisis — Retailers and Regional Resilience in Würzburg, Germany
(2021)
Research on the COVID-19 crisis and its implications on regional resilience is still in its infancy. To understand resilience on its aggregate level it is important to identify (non)resilient actions of individual actors who comprise regions. As the retail sector among others represents an important factor in an urban regions recovery, we focus on the resilience of (textile) retailers within the city of Würzburg in Germany to the COVID-19 pandemic. To address the identified research gap, this paper applies the concept of resilience. Firstly, conducting expert interviews, the individual (textile) retailers’ level and their strategies in coping with the crisis is considered. Secondly, conducting a contextual analysis of the German city of Würzburg, we wish to contribute to the discussion of how the resilience of a region is influenced inter alia by actors. Our study finds three main strategies on the individual level, with retailers: (1) intending to “bounce back” to a pre-crisis state, (2) reorganising existing practices, as well as (3) closing stores and winding up business. As at the time of research, no conclusions regarding long-term impacts and resilience are possible, the results are limited. Nevertheless, detailed analysis of retailers’ strategies contributes to a better understanding of regional resilience.
Digital platforms, understood as multi-sided matchmakers, have amassed huge power, reimagining the role of consumers, producers, and even ownership. They increasingly dictate the way the economy and urban life is organized. Yet, despite their influential and far-reaching role in shaping our economic as well as sociocultural world, our understanding of their embeddedness, namely how their activities are embedded in systems of social and societal relationships and how they conceptualize their main functions and actions in relation to their wider setting, remains rudimentary. Consequently, the purpose of this frontier paper is threefold. Firstly, it reveals the need to discuss and evaluate (dis-)embedding processes in platform urbanism in order to understand the underlying dynamics of platform power and urban transformation. Secondly, it aims to reveal the main reasons in regard to the difficulties in pinpointing digital platforms embeddedness. Thirdly, it seeks to propose future research unravelling the (dis-)embeddedness of the platform economy.
This paper argues for three main reasons namely unawareness, unaccountability and non-transparency of digital platforms that drive the lack of embeddedness and reaffirms platform power. This is mainly based on the configuration of new commodities, platforms’ strategic avoidance of labour protections and other regulatory frameworks as well as platforms’ secrecy in which they operate. This frontier paper argues that transferring the concept of embeddedness to the platform economy might serve as a valuable tool to understand and pinpoint essential dynamics and relationships at play, therefore proposing embeddedness as a basis for future research on the platform economy. It strongly argues that a more detailed understanding is urgently needed, in order to be able to understand, accompany and actively influence the development of the platform economy in regulatory terms.