Tech-Companies. An Analysis of Work Organisation in the Engineering Departments of Online Platform Firms

• Applicant: Dr. Alexander Ziegler
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 542322802

The rise of online platform firms has sparked an ongoing international debate in the social sciences about the characteristics of their corporate model, the reasons behind its rapid commercial success, and the implications for workers and our society. The research proposal aims to contribute to this debate by addressing an important research gap: It seeks to provide an analysis of the work organisation concepts that have been created and applied within the engineering organisations of online platform firms to realise their Internet-based commercial strategies. Its starting point is the observation that the work organisation within the engineering departments of online platform firms has received much less attention in the social science literature than, for example, the area of their product and market strategies and the appropriation of external value-creating activities. At the time these companies were founded, however, there were also hardly any blueprints for developing, operating, and scaling the complex software- and data-based Internet applications that form the core of their product offerings, and for organising the work involved in doing so. It is therefore argued that the concepts of work organisation that these companies developed during this period to build their systems and products constitute an important additional dimension of their corporate model, and that their analysis will contribute to advance the understanding of its characteristics. The research questions to be addressed are: 1. What concepts of work organisation have actors within the engineering organisations of online platform firms developed in order to realise their Internet-based commercial strategies? 2. How did these work organisation concepts emerge? 3. What are the differences and the common patterns that can be conceptualised between the work organisation developed in the sample firms? In order to answer the research questions posed, an analytical approach to the study of work organisation concepts is developed, drawing on the rich tradition of research on work organisation concepts in the sociology of work and industry. The empirical analysis will be based on two in-depth case studies of Google and Amazon, combining expert interviews to be conducted with former and current employees of these firms with a rich document analysis. Google and Amazon are chosen because they can be considered paradigmatic cases, as they were among the first start-ups to successfully build durable businesses around online platforms and are cited by many experts and practitioners in the field as having paved the way for others to follow. The case studies will focus on reconstructing the time period spanning from the beginnings of the start-ups through to their stabilisation in the second half of the 2000s. The findings of the project will be discussed and evaluated in a series of workshops with experts and practitioners during a short-term research stay at the University of Berkeley

• DFG Programme: WBP Position