The terms ‘platform economy’ or ‘sharing economy’ have become widespread with the development of digital platforms like Uber. This economy is transforming capitalism and raising important questions about its nature. Is it a new process of embeddedness or is it the next step for deregulation following the crisis of the financialised regime of accumulation (RA)? Is it a possible new Growth Regime? Using the approach of the French Régulation school of thought, we describe the nature and transformations of the form of competition inherent in platforms. Although this may favour some forms of re-embeddedness, we show that it will accelerate some of the trends and characteristics of the institutional forms of the financialised RA and that it is an endogenous product of its crisis. This raises further questions and uncertainties related to the ability of platforms to generate stable long run growth due to the dysfunctionality of the mode of régulation and the conflicts it could generate.
Informé par une ontologie, une épistémologie et des concepts forgés à l’aide d’une sociologie largement française, cet article propose de suivre dans l’abord des industries et de leur régulation en Europe une voie qui consiste à croiser les théories institutionnalistes développées en économie industrielle et en analyse des politiques publiques. Il montre ensuite que transformer ce cadre d’analyse en questions de recherche empiriques interdisciplinaires incite à structurer des recherches systématiques sur le gouvernement européen des industries. En incorporant une large palette d’organisations industrielles et politiques européennes, cette stratégie de recherche débouche enfin sur la formulation d’hypothèses clés sur la dynamique de ce gouvernement et, en particulier, sur le rôle qu’y joue la politique de la concurrence.
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