The Social Constitution of Scaling - Examining the Creation of Societal Alternatives in the Case of Platform-Based Ridehailing-Organizations

Accompanying the rise of the platform economy, scaling and scalability have become crucial topics for platform-based organizations. While not being a novelty as 20^th century companies were already discussing different ‘ways to scale’, both the relevance of scaling and its social forms changed substantially due to the favourable conditions resulting from online-platforms as socio-technical infrastructures. Most commonly describing a technical and economic procedure oriented towards market dominance, scaling in recent years is also seen as a generalized concept implemented by platform-based organizations in order to strive for divergent kinds of impacts from market disruption to the socio-ecological transformation of contemporary societies. So far, research on scaling either exclusively focusses on technical and economic factors or lacks complexity regarding the way scaling processes are socially constituted. As I will argue, scaling takes different social forms: organizational frameworks, the coordination and legitimization of practices and the overall embeddedness of organizations in plural institutional settings have to be taken into account in order to understand why organizations scale in a specific way and what enables or restricts them in doing so.

My dissertation project aims to build on this idea by taking a qualitative approach building case studies to examine how ridehailing-platforms, who try to scale for varying purposes and under different conditions in contested fields of personal transportation, make a compelling case for examining why and how social processes of scaling are coordinated differently in changing organizational and institutional settings. Competing with various platform-mediated services ranging from car-, bike- to e-scooter-rentals, ridehailing platforms try to establish alternatives or additions to conventional kinds of personal transportation, often being associated with discourses around “New Mobility” or the “Sharing Economy”. While some, most prominently the market-based ridehailing-platform Uber, seem to purely strive for global market dominance, others like the cooperative ridehailing-platform Eva protest these strivings by establishing a similar service embedded in a cooperativist framework to promote a societal cause. Located between these two extremes, corporate-based ridepooling-platforms such as CleverShuttle (Deutsche Bahn) or BerlKönig (BVG) take a third approach by framing themselves as a sustainable addition to public transport. By pursuing divergent goals and by acting under different conditions, ridehailing-platforms address the issue of scaling in a different way, eventually leading, as I will argue to specific social forms of scaling.