Sailing or Sinking Together : Container Shipping in Digital Platform Capitalism

Sammanfattning: This thesis addresses the classical research problem of collaboration among competing actors in the context of digital platform capitalism. This study investigates how ocean carriers attempted, and sometimes managed, to set standards, exchange data, and jointly develop supply chain management platforms despite the alleged risks of doing so. Using a mixed methods research design articulating quantitative and qualitative analysis, the investigation sheds light on how the incumbent company that launched those two initiatives engaged in meaning-making processes with the challengers it hoped to get on board. Following those meaning-making processes illustrates the hurdles for field-dominating actors to stimulate collaboration as their position is perceived by other actors as resulting from predatory practices and thereby casts doubts on the nature of their actual motives. The thesis first provides an analysis of the structure of the field of container shipping by characterising the variety of positions it contains and their relationships. The aim is to set the stage for the second part of the research design that delves into the emergence of two digital initiatives: the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) and Tradelens. The first initiative consisted of the establishment of an industry-wide organisation to provide container shipping with a set of standards, while the second had the ambition to serve as a for-profit digital infrastructure for the exchange of information on container journeys. The emergence of digital collaboration traces back to the activities of a group of IT executives in search of solutions to their common issues outside the boundaries of their organisations. While that professional group succeeded in making standardisation a key concern for the industry, as shown by the establishment of DCSA, the exchange of standardised data turned out to be much more problematic. The case of Tradelens underlines the boundaries of digital collaboration in a competitive field. While the incumbent that launched the platform managed to alleviate doubts about its willingness to derive a competitive advantage from the platform, it never managed to do it to the extent where the platform would gain operational traction. This study adds new knowledge to the field of digital platform capitalism by turning the attention to a case where platforms affect interfirm relationships by increasing the need for collaboration and by showing the utility, against technological-centred approaches, to rely on the tools of neo-institutional theories to grasp how technological change is embedded in the long-term trajectory of an industry.