From Automobile Capitalism to Platform Capitalism: Toyotism as a prehistory of digital platforms

Abstract

This article explores the automotive lineage and manufacturing origins of platforms. Challenging prevailing assumptions that the platform is a digital artefact, and platform capitalism a new era, this article traces crucial elements of platform capitalism to Toyotist automobile manufacture in order to rethink the relationship between technology and organization. Arguing that the very terminology and industry applications of the ‘platform’ emerge from the automobile industry over the course of the 20th century, this article cautions against the uncritical adoption of epochal paradigms, or assumptions that new technologies require new organizational forms. By parsing the platform into two types, the stack and the intermediary, this article demonstrates how the platform concept and data-driven production practice both develop out of the Toyota Production System in particular, and American and Japanese analyses of it. Toyotism, we show, is the unseen industrial and epistemological background against which the platform economy plays out. In making this case, this article highlights the crucial continuities between the data intensive production of companies like Uber and Amazon – emblematic of digital platform capitalism – and the organizational paradigms of the automobile industry. At a moment when the automobile returns to prominence amidst platforms such as Uber, Didi Chuxing, or Waymo, and as we find tech companies turning to automobile manufacturing, this automotive lineage of the platform offers a crucial reminder of the automotive origins of what we now call platform capitalism.

Making the Car “Platform Ready”: How Big Tech Is Driving the Platformization of Automobility

“…Recent work by Steinberg (2021) considers the “prehistory” of platform automobility in the shape of Japanese car manufacturer Toyota. Here a “Toyotist” mode of car production (Steinberg, 2021, p. 6) is offered as an automotive inspiration for contemporary digital platforms.…”

“…Recent work by Steinberg (2021) considers the “prehistory” of platform automobility in the shape of Japanese car manufacturer Toyota. Here a “Toyotist” mode of car production (Steinberg, 2021, p. 6) is offered as an automotive inspiration for contemporary digital platforms. Through innovations such as the outsourcing of vehicle part production, the use of just-in-time manufacturing (utilizing kanban and kaizen systems), and the collection of consumer data from sales partners, Steinberg argues that Toyota constitutes a much earlier model of platform production.…”

“…Through innovations such as the outsourcing of vehicle part production, the use of just-in-time manufacturing (utilizing kanban and kaizen systems), and the collection of consumer data from sales partners, Steinberg argues that Toyota constitutes a much earlier model of platform production. Yet while Steinberg argues that Toyotist production methods are “data-intensive” (Steinberg, 2021, p. 8), establishing the company as a “data-gathering intermediary shuttling information about demand throughout [its] entire production network” (Steinberg, 2021, p. 9), he acknowledges that “digital technologies and platforms . .…”

“…. data-gathering possibilities” (Steinberg, 2021, p. 17, emphasis added). It is this intensification of such possibilities, feeding back into the automotive industry from such digital technologies and platforms, that we focus on at various points throughout this article.…”

“…We build on prior research on the transformation of the vehicle, including Alvarez León (2019) on how cars became “mobile spatial media,” Wilken and Thomas (2019) on the car as a “communication platform,” Agre (2001) on the “wired car,” and Steinberg (2021) on “automobile platform capitalism” (p. 5). All emphasize how cars have long integrated navigational, communicational, and operational technologies, with the current platformization being but the latest effort to streamline car design and development.…”