Coping with digital market re-organization: How the hotel industry strategically responds to digital platform power

How do organizations in a sector where powerful platforms have emerged cope with the new constraints and opportunities that platforms induce? A growing number of studies highlight the power of digital platforms to re-organize markets and thereby create new forms of dependence. But there are also indications that organizations are capable of countering platform power especially by demanding their regulation. This paper expands this view to investigate also strategies at the organizational level. It draws on the algorithmic game studies of strategic responses to environmental changes to study how organizations strategically respond to the rise of digital platforms. To show organizations’ capacities to cope with the new digital market environment, we use a qualitative case study of the Swiss hotel sector and its reactions to so-called online travel agencies, based on interviews with hotel managers and professional representatives. We distinguish between three types of hotels—small family-run, luxury, and chain hotels, and identify three types of strategic responses: bypassing, optimizing, and mitigating. Contrary to a platform power perspective, we find some evidence for organizations’ capacity to keep platforms at bay, by limiting dependence through mitigation, and platforms’ reach through bypassing. Hotels also learn to “play the algorithmic game” and take advantage of platforms’ technological affordances, but such strategies seem to accommodate platform power rather than countering it. Finally, we find that hotels with fewer resources (small family-run hotels) are less equipped to counter platform power, suggesting that platforms risk fostering existing hierarchies and segmentation in markets.

From the post-industrial prophecy to the de-industrial nightmare: Stagnation, the manufacturing fetish and the limits of capitalist wealth

The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services’ inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism’s declining trajectory.

Analysing Indonesia’s infrastructure deficits from a developmentalist perspective

This paper analyses the performance and appropriateness of the Indonesian government’s ‘good governance’ institutional reform aimed at stimulating infrastructure construction. During the 15 years after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the government attempted to strengthen formal institutions with the goal of improving public investment efficiency and attracting private investors. By analysing policies in the construction industry in terms of company registration, procurement and state enterprises, the paper finds that the outcome was far from what was expected by technocratic-bureaucratic reform promoters as interest groups frequently succeeded in capturing the new institutional system. This paper then challenges the dominant narrative that overwhelmingly blames incomplete institutional reform for Indonesia’s slow infrastructure construction. Given the inherent market failure and political challenges in institutional reform, the paper argues that passive developmentalist policies, which resulted in conflictual state–business relations and insufficient public investment, were a prime cause that then set the stage for the emergence of state-led infrastructure development strategy from the mid-2010s.

Contorting transformations: Uneven impacts of the U.S.–Mexico automotive industrial complex

Contrary to the triumphalist rhetoric that describes the automotive industry as a lever for both regional development in North America and industrial upgrading in Mexico, this article argues that the formation of the Mexico–U.S. automotive complex has instead been consolidated on the basis of longstanding processes of uneven regional development. To make this argument, the paper examines how global economic restructuring, trade policies, domestic economic development processes, transnational firm decision making and the maintenance of the geopolitical border have reproduced extreme wage differences between the United States and Mexico, resulting in the creation of a regional automotive sector that is both highly integrated and highly unequal. In this scenario, both nations are home to profoundly different industrial landscapes: the U.S. hosts the highest value-added links of the production chain, monopolizing processes of innovation and scientific and technological knowledge production, while in contrast, Mexico manufactures the most labour intense and lowest value-added links of the automotive production chain. From this perspective, the Mexican economy can be essentially understood as an export manufacturing platform which derives its ‘competitiveness’ from the aggressive industry maintenance of low wages.

Three varieties of Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Rule by the experts, the people, the leader

Neoliberalism and authoritarianism are intimately connected, as is demonstrated by the existence of a growing body of literature on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. This article provides a taxonomy of authoritarian neoliberalism and claims that it appears in three varieties – technocracy, populist nationalism, and traditional authoritarianism. Also, it proposes both an overview of the varieties and an analysis of three states as case studies. States are investigated as actors which strongly contribute to the neoliberal project amidst a more complex process of multilocalized and variegated neoliberalizations, which have to be incorporated into the comparative research. First, Italy is studied as a consolidated Western democracy which has been often governed by technocrats, independent, non-party professionals who have recurrently been in power since the 1990s, and within the frame of an increasingly technocratic European Union. Second, the paper concentrates on Hungary, a semi-peripheral Central European country which has become an epitome of a populist nationalism with increasingly authoritarian traits. Third, the paper focuses on Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Union republic with no significant experience of liberal democracy before independence, and a key example of the ‘traditional authoritarian’ variety. The three varieties, however, are sometimes combined and coexisting, and their evolution will be decisive for the future of capitalism and liberal democracy.

The emergence of a New European Labour Policy regime: Continuity and change since the euro crisis

The architecture of European labour policy has changed in the past years of the euro crisis and its management. While in the pre-crisis phase EU labour policy still had a mainly symbolic character, the EU crisis management gave it a much more binding character. The article analyses the continuities and shifts in European labour policy against the background of austerity and crisis policy arguing that a new labour policy complex was able to emerge at the European level. While institutional shifts were considerable, the market-liberal orientation of labour policy remained in place. However, it was radicalized with the resilience approach. The article therefore provides an overview of the continuity and change of European labour policy in the euro crisis on the basis of institutional and discursive shifts.