Platform and Collective Intelligence

2The Platform Organization

The transformations brought about by new technologies are leading to increasingly hybrid organizations, as illustrated in Chapter 1, which must integrate different operating logics, such as decentralization¹ (Huang et al. 2017) or the duality between historical analogue activity, and the development of new digital services. Indeed, with the development of ICTs and the transition to the “information society”, most organizations are simultaneously carrying out offline and online activities (Prasarnphanich and Gillenson 2003). The information system² (Reix 2004; De Vaujany 2009; Mu et al. 2015), as a technical device, then takes a central place in accompanying the technological mediation of ICTs and their relations with end-users. After having introduced and defined the concept of platform, we will return to the platformization of organizations with the example of the State considered as a platform to illustrate how it works in concrete terms. Finally, we will conclude on the question of knowledge with regard to the platform and its specificities.

In the framework of this book, we place ourselves in a perspective (Chapters 3 and 4) where the platform can be conceived as a technical and technological base available to the actors of the organization, a base that the latter can mobilize according to his/her needs, in a logic of collaborative platforms (Compain et al. 2019), and this is in contrast to the capitalist platforms that will be discussed in this ...