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

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.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IMR-08-2023-0193
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Marketing & Strategy
College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School
Aston University (General)
Additional Information: Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited. This author's accepted manuscript is deposited under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) licence. This means that anyone may distribute, adapt, and build upon the work for non-commercial purposes, subject to full attribution. If you wish to use this manuscript for commercial purposes, please contact permissions@emerald.com
Uncontrolled Keywords: Developing countries,Interpretations,Meaning-making,Ridesharing platforms,User subversive behaviours,Value co-creation and capture,Marketing,Business and International Management
Publication ISSN: 1758-6763
Last Modified: 08 Nov 2024 08:26
Date Deposited: 17 Jul 2024 16:32
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.eme ... -0193/full/html (Publisher URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2024-10-01
Published Online Date: 2024-07-08
Accepted Date: 2024-06-19
Authors: Amissah, Karen
Sarpong, David (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-1533-4332)
Boakye, Derrick (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-2575-6723)
Carrington, David John (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-7977-9210)

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