Our aim is to develop a decomposition and systematize a consistent lexicon of platform terms to guide future IS research. Building on our data, we now interpret and discuss the clustering of the identified terms (Berente et al., 2019). We started this process by interpreting terms that exhibit a distance of 0.6 to 0.7 to each other (Fig. 3), leading us to identify six clusters in total. Identifying six clusters was a normative decision. Fewer clusters would have required combining clusters that appeared to be different (e.g., ‘social platform’ and ‘computing platform’), while more clusters would have obliterated the similarities between them (e.g., ‘social platform’ and ‘social networking platform’). Our six clusters are (1) abstract technology views on platforms, (2) specific views on hardware and software platforms, (3) social communities and online platforms, (4) economic platforms as digital markets, (5) general properties of platforms as IS artifacts for value co-creation, and (6) sharing platforms. In the following, we interpret and discuss the terms from each of the six clusters, focusing on the terms’ position in the dendrogram (Fig. 3), their SSWs (presented in the online appendix), seminal definitions in the IS literature (presented in the online appendix), and their use over time. Figure 4 visualizes the number of papers published per year for every relevant platform term identified, structured by the six clusters (top left to bottom right).
Abstract technology views on platforms
The first cluster comprises the terms ‘technology platform,’ ‘IT platform,’ ‘technological platform,’ ‘technical platform,’ ‘ecommerce platform,’ and ‘common platform,’ all of which refer to technical aspects of platforms. ‘Technology platform’ is a superordinate/collective concept that describes platforms from a technical perspective on an abstract level and its utilization has been increasing in popularity among IS researchers since its inception. A ‘technology platform’ refers to various contexts related to IT and IS (e.g., Njenga & Brown, 2012; Purao et al., 2018) and is defined as “a set of technologies that have been developed for various applications but share a common underlying basic concept” (L.-S. Fan et al., 2015, p. 2). Thus, the term refers to “a set of design elements and interfaces that make up a technology” (Kraemer & Dedrick, 2002, p. 9). The SSWs underline this view since they primarily consist of terms associated with the technical implementation of platforms (e.g., ‘functionality,’ ‘application,’ ‘device,’ ‘API,’ ‘middleware,’ ‘interoperable,’ ‘backend,’ ‘modular,’ ‘interface’). Another term frequently used in the IS literature is ‘IT platform.’ Both ‘technology platform’ and ‘IT platform’ exhibit the lowest distance between all terms, since they share a substantial set of their SSWs. Unsurprisingly, ‘IT platforms’ are described as “the extensible codebase of a software-based system that provides core functionality shared by the applications that interoperate with it and the interfaces through which they interoperate” (Tiwana et al., 2010, p. 676). The term refers to the technical structure of platforms that features a layered modular architecture. Due to the overlap of definitions, the similarity of their meaning, and the inherent focus of the IS discipline on information technology—which is more specific than the term ‘technology’—we propose to abandon the term ‘technology platform’ in favor of an ‘information technology platform’, to indicate that IS research concerning platforms invariably focuses on information technology.
‘Technological platforms’ refer to programming languages, frameworks, etc. used in Computer Science (e.g., Blechar et al., 2006; Prechelt, 2011). In IS research, the term is employed rather nonspecifically, as evidenced by its SSWs (the ten highest-ranked SSWs are ‘sophisticated,’ ‘option,’ ‘easily,’ ‘manner,’ ‘complement,’ ‘entire,’ ‘fundamentally,’ ‘configuration,’ ‘effectively,’ and ‘technologically’). Gawer (2014) posits:
Technological platforms can be usefully conceptualized as evolving organizations or meta- organizations that: (1) federate and coordinate constitutive agents who can innovate and compete; (2) create value by generating and harnessing economies of scope in supply or/and in demand; and (3) entail a modular technological architecture composed of a core and a periphery. (p.1240)
While the term is used frequently in the recent IS literature, our triangulation of the definition by Gawer (2014) and the SSWs reveals that the term ‘technological platform’ is an umbrella term that does not refer to any specific view of platforms. Hence, we recommend future researchers to discontinue its use in favor of more specific platform terms.
At the outset of platform research in IS, the term ‘technical platform’ was amongst the most frequently used term. However, it seems to have lost its appeal since, making it one of the least frequently used terms in this cluster (cf. Figure 4). It now seems to be confined to a technical context, in which hardware- and software-based infrastructure is described (Gillespie, 2010), primarily in the Computer Science literature (e.g., Elbanna & Linderoth, 2015; Mustonen-Ollila & Lyytinen, 2003). In this context, Benlian et al. (2015, p. 214) define the term ‘technical platform’:
All facets of a platform related to the technical development of third-party applications including, for example, the provision of APIs and SDKs as well as all kinds of regulatory processes (e.g., quality and content checks), documentations (e.g., help files) and communications (blogs or forums in the developer community) that go along with application development. (p.214)
This definition includes all artifacts that are related to a technical view on platforms. However, because the utilization of the term is declining and its SSWs align with the SSWs of ‘technology platform’ and ‘IT platform’, we recommend not using this term. Instead, researchers could refer to the more frequently used term of ‘information technology platform’ or any other more specific platform terms.
The term ‘ecommerce platform’ (or e-commerce platform) is defined as the following:
E-commerce platform provides users with a variety of business service component [sic], through which the business service component allows users to complete the online transaction process. […] E- commerce platforms not only provide users with functions of online transaction, but also provide users with a series of support services (Huang et al., 2011, pp. 2171–2172).
The term features the highest distance to all other terms in this cluster. Inspecting the timely distribution of the term in our data reveals that its usage seems to have peaked some years ago but is now outdated having been substituted with other terms since. Many of this term's SSWs refer to aspects that are now part of other, more specific research streams on platforms (e.g., ‘carsharing,’ ‘collaborate,’ ‘Airbnb,’ ‘crowdsource’). Examples for ‘ecommerce platforms’ provided in the literature (e.g., Amazon, ebay, Airbnb, Tripadvisor) substantiate this observation. Thus, we argue for discontinuing the use of the term ‘ecommerce platform’ in favor of using more specific or differentiated platform terms.
The term ‘common platform’ features a high distance to most of the other platform terms. Also, the word ‘common’ neither refers to the inner workings of a platform nor does it bear semantic value (cf. ‘most common platform’ in Park et al., 2007). Thus, we decided to exclude it from our analysis.
While this cluster contains a broad access to platforms, we view ‘IT platform’ as the most prominent term to be used in IS research when referring to a digital platform in a general sense.
Specific technology views on hardware and software platforms
The second cluster comprises the terms ‘open platform,’ ‘mobile platform,’ ‘computing platform,’ ‘hardware platform,’ ‘internet platform,’ ‘software platform,’ and ‘development platform.’ The term ‘multiple platform,’ which may have been shortened from its plural form during data pre-processing, is another term that we decided to drop due to its lack of clear semantics, as we did with ‘common platform’. Even if ‘multiple platform’ has a low distance score to ‘computing platform,’ a close inspection of the papers containing this term revealed that the term carries no specific meaning on its own. In contrast, we identified all other platform terms in this cluster as subtypes of the more general term ‘information technology platform’, as identified in cluster one.
The term ‘open platform’ does not refer to a specific platform type, but represents a research stream in IS that studies how platform openness impacts the development, evolution, and commercialization of a platform (Boudreau, 2010). Platform openness has been gaining increasing intention over the last couple of years, as researchers investigate it “as a governance-related concept reflecting the trade-off between retaining and relinquishing control over a platform” (Benlian et al., 2015, p. 210). The term's SSWs reveal topics of particular interest relating to, e.g., licensing, commercialization, proprietary (software), interoperability, and monetization.
The term ‘mobile platform’ is often used in the contexts of smartphones and other mobile devices (SSWs include ‘WhatsApp,’ ‘Symbian,’ ‘tablet,’ ‘smartphone’) that constitute boundary objects in mobile ecosystems that involve mobile device manufacturers, mobile network operators, mobile application developers, and other stakeholders (Basole & Karla, 2011). For a decade, the term was amongst the two most frequently used terms in this cluster. ‘Mobile platforms’ are viewed by Sørensen et al. (2015, p. 196) as:
Multi-sided markets [that] critically rely on architectural leverage (Thomas et al., 2014) through a critical mass of complementors and customers. Boundary resources (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013; Eaton et al., 2015) can support a highly distributed process subjected to combinations of centralised control and decentralised generativity (Tilson et al., 2010b).
Many papers investigate how different degrees of platform openness can lead to competitive advantage and to attracting more actors to join a platform ecosystem. Hence, “the issue of platform openness is therefore a critical issue for mobile platforms” (ibid).
The term ‘computing platform’ has been used frequently since 1995 and ranked second as the most frequently used terms in this cluster in more recent years (cf. Figure 4). The term's SSWs reveal that research on ‘computing platforms’ concerns, among others, the Internet of Things (IoT), which is the SSW with the highest similarity score. Consequently, Athanas and Abbott (1995, p. 16) have argued, back in the mid-1990s, that ‘computing platforms’ were “emerging as a class of computers that can provide near application-specific computational performance.” Other common topics identified in the SSWs are virtualization, deployment, and scalability. Hence, we conclude that the term ‘computing platform’ is used by IS scholars to report on scenarios in which computational power is outsourced to platforms that can be employed as-a-service to solve computational problems.
The term ‘hardware platform’ is used if referring to hardware issues related to platforms (SSWs include ‘installation,’ ‘mainframe,’ ‘workstation,’ ‘PC,’ ‘microcomputer’). This view is in line with definitions in the IS literature which introduce a ‘hardware platform’ as “a family of architectures that allow substantial re-use of software” (Keutzer et al., 2000, p. 1528) that “executes software application programs” (de Michell & Gupta, 1997, p. 349). In line with this definition, the term ‘software platform’ is used to refer to the development and deployment of software applications (SSWs: ‘linux,’ ‘application,’ ‘deployment,’ ‘SDK,’ ‘apache,’ ‘iOS). The definition by Taudes et al. (2000) explains how software and hardware platforms are integrated: “A software platform is a software package that enables the realization of application systems. […] Together with the hardware and the organizational knowledge about planning, designing, and operating application systems, the software platforms in use constitute a firm’s information technology infrastructure” (Taudes et al., 2000, pp. 227–228). However, both terms refer to separate views on platforms that need to go hand in hand to successfully design and develop platforms from a technical point of view.
Surprisingly, the IS literature does not define the next term in this cluster, ‘development platform.’ The literature only provides an example of a ‘development platform’ with the open-source development platform EclipseFootnote 3 (Mehra et al., 2011). This observation is in line with SSWs such as (ruby on) ‘rails,’ ‘ocean,’ ‘j2ee,’ and ‘petrel’, all representing other programming frameworks. Thus, research using the term ‘development platform’ concerns tools and frameworks that support programmers with the software development process.
The last term in the second cluster is ‘internet platform.’ It has received relatively stable attention throughout the last decade, while all other terms, apart from ‘hardware platform,’ are used more often in the IS literature. The term refers to the prospects of the Internet connecting distinct groups of users remotely by enabling “transactions [...] by using the Internet platform (e.g. TCP/IP, HTTP, XML) in conjunction with the existing IT infrastructure” (Zhu et al., 2006, p. 601). The corresponding SSWs identified (e.g., ‘interactive,’ ‘channel,’ ‘push,’ ‘ubiquitous’) substantiate this view, making the term generic and outdated, since any contemporary (digital) platform is based on the premises of internet technologies. Thus, we argue that the term has become obsolete.
In sum, our data provides evidence that research on platforms as digital tools considers diverse layers of technologies, comprising hardware such as mobile devices, computing infrastructures, protocols and networking technologies, software development frameworks, and software execution environments. While it is possible to address each layer specifically, the established set of terms is overlapping. We interpret these overlaps as part of a broader trend in which particular layers of technology are abstracted in favour of considering complete technology stacks.
Online communities and social platforms
The third cluster includes the terms ‘social platform,’ ‘social media platform,’ ‘online platform,’ ‘social networking platform,’ and ‘communication platform,’ exhibiting a maximum distance of 0.6, showing the considerable degree of semantic overlap.
‘Social platform’ as a concept lacks a popular and well-cited definition in IS research, although it is mainly seen as a tool for connecting users to enable interaction and communication (Cheung et al., 2011; Mitchell-Wong et al., 2008). Examples of ‘social platforms’ include social networking websites, online discussion forums, and blogs (Cheung et al., 2014; Cui et al., 2016), thus covering a wide range of such platforms. We choose ‘social platforms’ to represent the cluster itself as an umbrella term covering different platforms that focus on social interactions and connections.
The concept of ‘social media platform’ has evolved to become the most frequently used platform term in the IS knowledge base (cf. Table 2). ‘Social media platforms’ “facilitate information exchange between users” (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 60), covering different forms of user-generated content (Wade et al., 2020). Kallinikos and Constantiou (2015, p. 73) propose viewing ‘social media platforms’ as “huge interaction machines rather than algorithms.” The SSWs underline these definitions (e.g., ‘microblogg,’ ‘twitter,’ ‘channel,’ ‘LinkedIn,’ ‘strategically,’ ‘facebook,’ ‘widespread,’ ‘instagram,’ ‘targeted,’ and ‘commercial.’) A ‘social media platform’ refers to user-generated content and media, and their sharing in online communities. Thus, the term is a specialized version of ‘social platform.’
‘Online platform’ is another prevalent platform term in this cluster. At a first glance, ‘online platform’ seems remotely connected to the other terms in this cluster, since it does not convey clear semantics apart from its reference to the Internet. Definitions for ‘online platforms’ are scarce, comprising a technological basis, delivering and aggregating services (Batura et al., 2015), and facilitating involvement and interactions for users and crowds (Nevo & Kotlarsky, 2020; OECD, 2019). The context in which platforms are characterized as ‘online platforms’ is, however, diverse and covers a broad outset of IS research areas focusing on social interactions and online communities, as evidenced by the cluster analysis and the SSWs. Thus, we propose the discontinuation of the terms due to its unclear and inconsistent meaning, and its nonspecific reference to digital platforms. Instead, we advise IS researchers to use ‘digital platform’ (cf. Section 4.5) or to refer to a more specific platform term.
A ‘social networking platform’ links “networks of users with the providers of various services and applications” (Bakos & Katsamakas, 2008, p. 172). ‘Social networking platforms’ often integrate third-party developers, who can integrate third-party content on the platform (Felt & Evans, 2008). In the IS literature and the SSWs we can identify ‘social networking platforms’ being LinkedIn, Yammer, Facebook, and Twitter. As such, ‘social networking platforms’ focus on promoting interactions between users, helping them with networking and connecting activities. Thus, we view ‘social networking platforms’ as another specialization of ‘social platforms.’
The last term in this cluster is ‘communication platform.’ Considering the evolution of platform terms in the history of IS (cf. Figure 4), this term was deemed to represent the archetype of a ‘social platform’ up to 2008, whereas they have now turned into the least popular terms in this cluster. This observation aligns with definitions of a ‘communication platform’ reaching back to 1998 (Bertino, 1998), but it should be noted that the interpretation of ‘communication platform’ has evolved from being a client-server architecture, predominantly on the Internet (Bertino, 1998), to having become a system which enables users to send, read, and reply to direct messages from other Internet users (Chang & Wu, 2014). As such, ‘communication platforms’ can improve knowledge management across organizations by decreasing required human communication (Dullaert et al., 2009; Jin & Kotlarsky, 2012). The SSWs underline this interpretation (e.g., ‘sms,’ ‘intranet,’ ‘messaging,’ ‘channel,’ ‘dialogue,’ ‘connect.’) We, therefore, view ‘communication platforms’ as a third specialization of ‘social platforms.’
Economic platforms as digital markets
An economic view on platforms as digital markets covers the terms ‘crowdfunding platform’ and ‘crowdsourcing platform’. Both types of platforms focus on economic effects and crowd involvement. Due to these terms’ definitions and their similarity to (two−/multi-) ‘sided platforms’, we incorporated ‘sided platform’ in this cluster, to comprise three terms.
‘Crowdfunding platforms’ enable the “financing of a project or a venture by a group of individuals instead of professional parties” (Schwienbacher & Larralde, 2010, p. 370) via internet services (Burtch et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2015). As such, ‘crowdfunding platforms’ allow individuals to freely present ideas to an online community to raise financial support for the realization of their products or services, matching ideas with investors (Gerber et al., 2012). Examples of ‘crowdfunding platforms’ are RocketHub, Kickstarter, and IndieGoGo (Gerber et al., 2012), which also feature at the top of the list of the term's SSWs.
Crowdsourcing is defined as a “type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non- profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task” (Estellés-Arolas & González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, 2012, p. 197). ‘Crowdsourcing platforms’ enable these activities for online communities, propelling rivalry by incentives (Bauer et al., 2016), which is supported by the SSWs (e.g., ‘brokerage,’ ‘intermediary,’ ‘advice,’ and ‘challenge’). Thus, while both terms refer to digital markets, ‘crowdsourcing platforms’ and ‘crowdfunding platforms’ differ by the type of activities they enable and the purpose of the community involvement.
A closer inspection of the papers containing ‘sided platform’ reveals that this term encapsulates more specific terms, such as ‘multi-sided platform,’ and ‘two-sided platform,’ which were automatically shortened during data pre-processing, since numbers are function words. Multi-sided platforms “coordinate the demand of distinct groups of customers who need each other in some way” (Evans, 2003, p. 325), e.g., in dating clubs and yellow pages. Two-sided platforms focus on (in-)direct network effects between two sides of a market, mostly investigating pricing structures (Hagiu, 2007). Research on both two-sided and multi-sided platforms focusses on economic effects, e.g., pricing, economic models, and market competition (Evans, 2003; Hagiu, 2007; Hagiu & Wright, 2015) also supported by the SSWs (e.g., ‘champion,’ ‘cryptocurrency,’ ‘instruments,’ and ‘enabler.’)
All terms comprising this cluster focus on investigating the economic effects on platforms. This observation is consistent with the term's evolution over time (cf. Figure 3). While all terms emerged after 2010, they have become increasingly popular. Interestingly, they refer to different types of platforms, such that they can co -exist without the substantial overlay that we identified in other clusters (e.g., clusters 1 and 2).
General properties of platforms as IS artifacts for value co-creation
We identified the fifth cluster to cover terms that refer to platforms from an abstract perspective, highlighting the general properties that constitute the inner core of platforms and hold across diverse application scenarios.
‘Digital platforms’ refer to platforms as IS artifacts designed to attract and incorporate content supplied by third parties. A prominent review of research on ‘digital platforms’ is provided by de Reuver et al. (2018), differentiating a technical perspective on ‘digital platforms’ as “an extensible codebase to which complementary third-party modules can be added” from a socio-technical view of ‘digital platforms’ as “technical elements (of software and hardware) and associated organizational processes and standards” (de Reuver et al., 2018, p. 127). Both definitions refer closely to earlier conceptualizations of platforms (Sedera et al., 2016; Tiwana et al., 2010) and treat an extensible codebase as an indispensable feature constituting ‘digital platforms.’ In contrast with this technical viewpoint, the SSWs associated with ‘digital platform’ in our dataset show the evolution of the term which now refers to platforms in a much broader sense, comprising strategic (e.g., tactic, ambidextrous, strategizing), economic (e.g., intermediary, payment, marketplace), organizational (e.g., meta-organization, ecosystem, start-up), and technological (e.g., blockchain, architecture, IoT) aspects. Against this backdrop, ‘digital platforms’—the platform term displaying the most significant growth rate in research papers covering recent years—seem to have become the basic concept in IS when referring to platforms in an abstract sense, highlighting the platforms' most central properties, while abstracting from specific aspects of their design and use.
A similarly abstract view on ‘digital platforms’ is reflected in the term ‘service platform.’ A ‘service platform’ is a “modular structure that consists of tangible and intangible components (resources) and facilitates the interaction of actors and resources (or resource bundles)” (Lusch & Nambisan, 2015, p. 162). Thus, the concept focuses on the role of a platform to facilitate value co-creation among the actors interacting on the platform, thereby constituting a service ecosystem (Lusch & Nambisan, 2015). Service—as viewed from the service-dominant logic standpoint (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) on which this definition is based—is an abstract concept, referring to “the application of specialized competences […] through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself” (Vargo & Lusch, 2004, p. 2). While particular types of service can be co-created with ‘digital platforms,’ ‘service platforms’ as a concept deals with the mechanisms that lead to co- creating value irrespective of these more specialized platform types. For instance, a ‘service platform’ can explain the mechanisms constituting value co-creation on a multi-sided market or a social media platform by applying an abstract lens on value co-creation, even if the way in which value co-creation works on each platform type might differ.
While a ‘cloud platform’ lacks a consistent definition in the extant literature, its recurring properties concern technical and business model aspects in terms of how the platform “deploy[s] software via the Internet” (Katzan, 2009, p. 256). A boundary-spanning role—integrating technical aspects and business aspects—is reflected in the term's position in our dendrogram, and by its SSWs (business aspects include ‘marketplace,’ ‘consulting,’ ‘commercialize,’ ‘brokerage,’ ‘competency,’ technical aspects include ‘virtualization,’ ‘proprietary,’ ‘infrastructure,’ ‘tenancy,’ and multiple classes of applications such as enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management). Consistent with this boundary-spanning role, Katzan (2009, p. 260) defines a ‘cloud platform’ as “an operating system that runs in the cloud and supports the software-as-a-service concept.” From a technical point of view, a ‘cloud platform’ provides infrastructure (infrastructure-as-a-service, e.g., virtualized hardware), development platforms for software (platform-as-a-service, e.g., middleware), or software (software- as-a-service, e.g., business applications) as a shared pool of virtualized resources that is scalable and available. Third-party users can deploy their software and have it hosted in the cloud as a managed service, or they can deploy and run their own applications in the cloud (Katzan, 2009). A prominent example is Google Cloud Platform,Footnote 4 which supplies business customers with, amongst others, solutions to design cloud-based data storage, monitoring and analytics solutions, mobile apps, and media solutions. As one aspect of cloud computing, ‘cloud platforms’ refer to as-a-service business models that build on metered or subscription pricing models, depending on the resources consumed by users over time (Katzan, 2009). As-a-service business models help users, amongst others, to adjust their computing resources to flexible demand using pooled resources, to lower their capital lockup, and to have flexible and scalable access to computing resources that are placed “somewhere in the Internet”, i.e., in the cloud (Katzan, 2009, p. 257).
Sharing platforms
In our cluster analysis, the term ‘sharing platform’ shows the highest distances (> 0.8) from all other clusters, marking it out as a cluster in its own right. At a higher level of detail our data indicate that the vocabulary associated with ‘sharing platform’ relates to both platform economics (cf. Section 4.4) and to online communities (cf. Section 4.3), displaying a strong connection with economic transactions (SSW: ‘rental,’ ‘barter,’ ‘lending,’ ‘rideshare,’ ‘commercial,’ ‘money,’ ‘carsharing’) and peer-to-peer interactions, as frequently implemented on ‘sharing platforms’ (SSW: ‘P2P,’ ‘C2C,’ ‘ecosystems’).
Despite this apparent overlap of social and economic aspects in sharing, the IS literature uses ‘sharing platform’ differently from economic platforms or online communities. By definition, ‘sharing platforms’ “facilitate sharing among people who do not know each other, and who lack friends or connections in common, […] mak[ing] stranger sharing less risky and more appealing because they source information on users via the use of ratings and reputations” (Frenken & Schor, 2017, p. 4). As such, they provide a mediating technology to enable sharing between different parties (Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2018). Seminal work on sharing (Belk, 2010) outlined why sharing, gift giving, and marketplace exchange represent very different prototypes of interactions, emphasizing that “sharing tends to be a communal act that links us to other people” (Belk, 2010, p. 717), and which can be seen as “nonreciprocal pro-social behavior” (Benkler, 2004, p. 275). Caring for others and social bonding are seen as defining characteristics of sharing (Belk, 2010). The same characteristics can also be found in research on online communities; Karahanna et al. (2018) identify relatedness as a psychological need in the social media context, defined as the “need to interact, be connected to, and experience caring for others” (Karahanna et al., 2018, p. 740). In contrast to sharing, economic exchange is traditionally characterized by a transfer of ownership and an impersonal relationship between exchanging parties (Belk, 2010). While the Internet has brought up new forms of Internet-facilitated sharing (Belk, 2014)—e.g., enabling people to share data with strangers and material goods in their neighborhoods—sharing is still supposed to be a social, not-for-profit interaction.
However, on digital platforms, references to ‘sharing’ are incongruent with its original meaning, rather pointing to a collaborative consumption of under-utilized resources. Collaborative consumption occurs when “people coordinat[e] the acquisition and distribution of a resource for a fee or other compensation,” also termed pseudo- sharing “in that they often take on a vocabulary of sharing (e.g., ‘car sharing’), but are more accurately short - term rental activities” (both: Belk, 2014, p. 1597). For instance, the platforms featured in the SSWs of ‘sharing platform’ (Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, or Lyft) enable users to consume houses or transportation collaboratively, using digital platforms that enable impersonal interactions among service providers and customers on a digital multi- sided market.
We conclude that as a theoretical lens, proper sharing leans towards the use of platforms to establish social communities, while collaborative consumption leans towards market-based interactions as a domain of platform economics. We conclude that the concept of a ‘sharing platform’ is often used inconsistently with foundational concepts of sharing and, therefore, cannot provide the missing link to connect “social network research, such as research on collective intelligence, with the domain of online social commerce as it is established in C2C interactions” (Puschmann & Alt, 2016, p. 95). We propose that—instead of using ‘sharing platform’—digital platforms that link actors for the purpose of nonreciprocal social behavior should be referred to as ‘social platforms’, whereas the term ‘(two-/multi-) sided platforms’ should be used to refer to a digital platform that enables impersonal market-based interactions, including collaborative consumption in a peer-to-peer network. With this distinction, research can avoid confusion concerning the terms ‘sharing platform’ and sharing.