Examining Ecosystems and Infrastructure Perspectives of Platforms: The Case of Small Tourism Service Providers in Indonesia and Rwanda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Digital platforms are significantly affecting how firms and individuals undertake economic exchange. With their global expansion, exploring the implications of platforms for those who sell goods or provide services in the global south is an important agenda for determining their value. Yet, we argue that existing frameworks only provide a partial understanding of activities and relations. In this paper, we examine platforms through an analysis of two theoretical perspectives. Established ecosystems perspectives focus on platform governance, centralizing the activities of the ‘platform owner’. Such perspectives allow an analysis of platform strategy but can underplay the ways platform sellers and service providers engage with platforms. Infrastructure perspectives, in contrast, approach platforms as large and complex systems, which we argue allows for better analysis of the practices and agency of such actors. An analysis of small tourism service providers in Indonesian and Rwandan tourism supports the discussion of these two perspectives. Findings highlight the growth of global platforms, but service providers face challenges in using them effectively. Infrastructure perspectives highlight risks that service providers face in being pulled into adverse relationships as platforms become ubiquitous. As platforms expand, their complexity leads to challenges in engagement, but with potential for learning and collaboration.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".