Abstract
Digital labor platforms are gaining in popularity in our societies. Information systems and software engineering disciplines have focused on organizational and technological aspects of these platforms, favoring the views of platform owners. At the same time, extensive knowledge of how workers use these platforms, and how they are affected by them, is emerging within computer-supported collaborative work and human-computer interaction disciplines. These two strands of research, one favoring the views of the platform owners and the other advocating the views of the platform users, are mainly developed in parallel and without influencing each other much. In this paper, we describe a case study of designing a digital labor platform for person-centered dementia care in a small company. Dementia care illustrates an extreme case of a complex type of work. This complexity helps us debate some of the benefits and shortcoming of current platforms and platform governance models. We analyze our case using an adaptation of the platform boundary resources model. This model helps us illustrate the tensions between platform owners and workers. A focus on platform governance models and how we co-create such models can hopefully lead to better designs for both views.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
10 May 2020
The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. Figures 6 and 7 have been swapped.
Notes
The origins of the idea of core and periphery can be traced back to the work of Wallerstein on the world-systems theory. See for instance (Robinson 2011). We thank the reviewers for pointing this out.
In April 2019, providing meaningful daily activities to dementia patients was turned into a law in Norway, and responsibility to enact the law was given to municipalities.
Human rights breaches in Norwegian elderly care, such as physical restrictions and drug abuse, was investigated by the Norwegian national broadcaster NRK in 2014. See for instance https://www.nrk.no/norge/erkjenner-menneskerettighetsbrudd-i-norsk-eldreomsorg-1.12063524.
References
Aloisi, Antonio (2016). Commoditized workers: Case study research on labour law issues arising from a set of “on-demand/gig economy” platforms. Comparative Labor Law & Policy, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 1–38.
Baldwin, Carliss Y.; and C. Jason Woodard (2011). The architecture of platforms: A unified view. In Platforms, Markets and Innovation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Inc.
Bellotti, Victoria; Alexander Ambard; Daniel Turner; Christina Gossmann; Kamila Demkova; and John M. Carroll (2015). A Muddle of Models of Motivation for Using Peer-to-Peer Economy Systems. In CHI ‘15. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 18–23 April 2015. New York: ACM Press, pp. 1085–94.
Bernstein, Michael S.; Desney Tan; Greg Smith; Mary Czerwinski; and Eric Horvitz (2010). Personalization via Friendsourcing. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 1–28.
Bly, Sara A.; Steve R. Harrison; and Susan Irwin (1993). Media spaces: Bringing people together in a video, audio, and computing environment. Communications of the ACM, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 28–46.
Boudreau, Kevin J.; and Karim R. Lakhani (2009). How to manage outside innovation. MIT Sloan Management Review, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 69–76.
Bratteteig, Tone; and Ina Wagner (2016). Unpacking the notion of participation in participatory design. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 425–75.
Braun, V.; and V. Clarke (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 77–101.
Brooker, Dawn (2003). What is person-Centred Care in Dementia? Reviews in Clinical Gerontology, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 215–22.
Burgener, Sandra C.; Linda L. Buettner; Elizabeth Beattie; and Karen M. Rose (2009). Effectiveness of community-based, nonpharmacological interventions for early-stage dementia: Conclusions and recommendations. Journal of Gerontological Nursing, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 50–57.
Ceccagnoli, Marco; and Chris Forman (2012). Cocreation of value in a platform ecosystem: The case of Enterprise software. MIS Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 263–90.
Choudary, Sangeet Paul (2018). The architecture of digital labour platforms: Policy recommendations on platform Design for Worker Well-Being. ILO Future of Work Research Paper. International Labour Organization.
Ciborra, Claudio U. (1996). The platform organization: Recombining strategies, structures, and surprises. Organization Science, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 103–18.
Constantinides, Panos; Ola Henfridsson; and Geoffrey G. Parker (2018). Introduction—Platforms and infrastructures in the digital age. Information Systems Research, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 381–400.
Dawson, Alison; Alison Bowes; Fiona Kelly; Kari Velzke; and Richard Ward (2015). Evidence of What Works to Support and Sustain Care at Home for People with Dementia: A Literature Review with a Systematic Approach. BMC Geriatrics, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 59.
Eaton, Ben; Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood; Carsten Sorensen; and Ougnjin Yoo (2015). Distributed tuning of boundary resources: The case of Apple’s IOS Service system. MIS Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 217–43.
Edvardsson, David; Bengt Winblad; and P. O. Sandman (2008). Person-Centred Care of People with severe Alzheimer’s disease: Current status and ways forward. Lancet Neurology, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 362–67.
Eisenmann, Thomas; Geoffrey Parker; and Marshall W. Van Alstyne (2006). Strategies for two- sided markets. Harvard Business Review, vol. 84, no. 10, pp. 92–101.
Farshchian, B.A., and T. Vilarinho (2017). Which Mobile health toolkit should a service provider choose? A comparative evaluation of apple Healthkit, Google fit, and Samsung digital health platform. In: Braun A., Wichert R., Maña A. (eds): Ambient Intelligence. AmI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10217. Springer, Cham, pp. 152–158.
Farshchian, Babak A.; Thomas Vilarinho; and Marius Mikalsen (2017). From episodes to continuity of care: A study of a call Center for Supporting Independent Living. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 309–43.
Finansdepartementet (2017). Delingsøkonomien – Muligheter Og Utfordringer. 2017: 4. NOU 2017:4. Oslo, Norway: Norges offentlige utredninger.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 219–45.
Frenken, Koen; and Juliet Schor (2017). Putting the Sharing Economy into Perspective. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, vol. 23, Elsevier, pp. 1–8.
Gann, David M. (2015). Architectural leverage: Putting platforms in context. Academy of Management Perspectives, vol. 3015, no. 1, pp. 47–67.
Gauthier, Serge; Jeffrey Cummings; Clive Ballard; Henry Brodaty; George Grossberg; Philippe Robert; and Constantine Lyketsos (2010). Management of Behavioral Problems in Alzheimer’s disease. International Psychogeriatrics, vol. 22, no. 03, pp. 346–72.
Gawer, Annabelle (2014). Bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms: Toward an integrative framework. Research Policy, vol. 43, no. 7, pp. 1239–49.
Ghazawneh, Ahmad; and Ola Henfridsson (2013). Balancing platform control and external contribution in third-party development: The boundary resources model. Information Systems Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 173–92.
Gitlin, Laura N.; Laraine Winter; Tracey Vause Earland; E. Adel Herge; Nancy L. Chernett; Catherine V. Piersol; and Janice P. Burke (2009). The tailored activity program to reduce behavioral symptoms in individuals with dementia: Feasibility, acceptability, and replication potential. The Gerontologist, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 428–39.
Glöss, Mareike; Moira McGregor; and Barry Brown (2016). Designing for Labour: Uber and the On-Demand Mobile Workforce. In CHI ‘16. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, San Jose, California, USA, 7–12 May 2016. New York: ACM Press, pp. 1632–43.
Gray, Mary L.; Siddharth Suri; Syed Shoaib Ali; and Deepti Kulkarni (2016). The Crowd is a Collaborative Network. In CSCW ‘16. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, San Francisco, California, USA, 27 February – 2 March 2016. New York: ACM Press, pp. 134–47.
Gross, Jane (2008). Series on home health aides. The New York Times Blog ‘The New Old Age’, December 2008. https://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/home-health-aides-why-hire-from-an-agency/. Last accessed 9 April 2019.
Gupta, Neha; David Martin; Benjamin V. Hanrahan; and Jacki O’Neill (2014). Turk-life in India. In GROUP’14. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Supporting Group Work, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, 9–12 November 2014. New York: ACM Press, pp. 1–11.
Harmon, Ellie; and M. Six Silberman (2018). Rating working conditions on digital labor platforms. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 27, no. 3–6, pp. 1275–1324.
Islind, Anna Sigridur; Tomas Lindroth; Ulrika Lundh Snis; and Carsten Sørensen (2016). Co-Creation and Fine-Tuning of Boundary Resources in Small-Scale Platformization. In Lundh Snis U. (eds): Nordic Contributions in IS Research. SCIS 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 259. Springer Cham, pp. 149–62
Kales, Helen C.; Laura N. Gitlin; and Constantine G. Lyketsos (2014). Management of Neuropsychiatric Symptoms of dementia in clinical settings: Recommendations from a multidisciplinary expert panel. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 762–69.
Kenney, M.; and J. Zysman (2016). The rise of the platform economy. Issues in Science and Technology, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 61–69.
Kirkley, Catherine; Claire Bamford; Marie Poole; Hilary Arksey; Julian Hughes; and John Bond (2011). The impact of Organisational culture on the delivery of person-Centred Care in Services Providing Respite Care and Short Breaks for people with dementia. Health & Social Care in the Community, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 438–48.
Kittur, Aniket; Jeffrey V. Nickerson; Michael Bernstein; Elizabeth Gerber; Aaron Shaw; John Zimmerman; Matt Lease; and John Horton (2013). The future of crowd work. In CSCW’13. Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on computer supported cooperative work, San Antonio, Texas, USA, 23–27 February 2013. New York: ACM Press, pp. 1301–1318.
Kitwood, T. (1997). The experience of dementia. Aging & Mental Health, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 13–22.
Klein, Heinz K.; and Michael D. Myers (1999). A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems. MIS Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 67–94.
Kraut, Robert E.; Robert S. Fish; Robert W. Root; and Barbara L. Chalfonte (1990). Informal communication in organizations: Form, function, and technology. In Oskamp, I. S. and S. Spacapan (eds): Human reactions to technology: Claremont symposium on applied social psychology. Beverly Hills, Calif.: SAGE Publications, pp. 145–99.
Star, Susan Leigh (2010). This is not a boundary object: Reflections on the origin of a concept. Science, Technology & Human Values, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 601–17.
Livingston, Gill; Lynsey Kelly; Elanor Lewis-Holmes; Gianluca Baio; Stephen Morris; Nishma Patel; Rumana Z. Omar; Cornelius Katona; and Claudia Cooper (2014). A Systematic Review of the Clinical Effectiveness and Cost-Effectiveness of Sensory, Psychological and Behavioural Interventions for Managing Agitation in Older Adults with Dementia. Health Technology Assessment, vol. 18, no. 39.
Lloyd, Barbara; and Christine Stirling (2015). A Tool to Support Meaningful Person-Centred Activity for Clients with Dementia – a Delphi Study. BMC Nursing, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 10.
Lorenz, Klara; Paul P. Freddolino; Adelina Comas-Herrera; Martin Knapp; and Jacqueline Damant (2019). Technology-based tools and Services for People with dementia and Carers: Mapping technology onto the dementia care pathway. Dementia, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 725–41.
Lyketsos, Constantine G.; Maria C. Carrillo; J. Michael Ryan; Ara S. Khachaturian; Paula Trzepacz; Joan Amatniek; Jesse Cedarbaum; Robert Brashear; and David S. Miller (2011). Neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 532–39.
Martin, Chris J. (2016). The sharing economy: A pathway to sustainability or a nightmarish form of neoliberal capitalism? Ecological Economics, vol. 121, pp. 149–59.
Martin, David; Benjamin V. Hanrahan; Jacki O’Neill; and Neha Gupta (2014). Being a turker. In CSCW’14. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 15–19 February 2014. New York: ACM Press, pp. 224–35.
Morgan, Debra; Anthea Innes; and Julie Kosteniuk (2011). Dementia Care in Rural and Remote Settings: A systematic review of formal or paid care. Maturitas, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 17–33.
Moser, Christiane; Alina Krischkowsky; Katja Neureiter; and Manfred Tscheligi (2015). Mediating informal care online : Findings from an extensive requirements analysis. Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal - IxD&A, vol. spring, no. 24, pp. 33–48.
Ormseth, Holly (2016). Your Ride, Your Music. Uber Newsroom, September 8, 2016. https://www.uber.com/newsroom/ridermusic/. Accessed April 9, 2019.
Pentland, Brian T.; and Martha S. Feldman (2008). Designing routines: On the folly of designing artifacts, while hoping for patterns of action. Information and Organization, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 235–50.
Prince, Martin; Adelina Comas-Herrera; Martin Knapp; Maëlenn Guerchet; and Maria Karagiannidou (2016). World Alzheimer Report 2016.
Procter, Rob; Trisha Greenhalgh; Joe Wherton; Paul Sugarhood; Mark Rouncefield; and Sue Hinder (2014). The day-to-day co-production of ageing in place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 245–67.
Raval, Noopur; and Paul Dourish (2016). Standing out from the crowd: Emotional labor, body labor, and temporal labor in ridesharing. In CSCW’16. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, San Francisco, California, USA, 27 February – 2 March 2016. New York: ACM Press, pp. 97–107.
Reuver, Mark de; Carsten Sørensen; and Rahul C. Basole (2018). The digital platform: A research agenda. Journal of Information Technology, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 124–35.
Robinson, William I. (2011). Globalization and the sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein: A critical appraisal. International Sociology, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 723–45.
Rosenblat, Alex; and Luke Stark (2016). Uber’s drivers: Information asymmetries and control in dynamic work. International Journal of Communication, vol. 10, no. 27, pp. 3758–3784.
Rothera, Ian; Rob Jones; Rowan Harwood; Anthony J. Avery; Kate Fisher; Veronica James; Ian Shaw; and Jonathan Waite (2008). An evaluation of a specialist multiagency home support Service for Older People with dementia using qualitative methods. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 65–72.
Schreieck, Maximilian; Manuel Wiesche; and Helmut Krcmar (2016). Design and Governance of Platform Ecosystems – Key Concepts and Issues for Future Research. In ECIS 2016. Twenty-fourth European conference on information systems, İstanbul, Turkey, 12-15 June 2016. AIS, pp. 1–20.
Thomassen, Hanne E.; and Babak A. Farshchian (2016). A technology-enhanced service for person-centered dementia care. In PETRA’16. Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments. New York: ACM Press, article nr. 52.
Tiwana, Amrit (2013). Platform ecosystems: Aligning architecture, governance, and strategy. Waltham, MA, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.
Tiwana, Amrit; Benn Konsynski; and Ashley A. Bush (2010). Platform evolution: Coevolution of platform architecture, governance, and environmental dynamics. Information Systems Research, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 675–87.
Topo, Päivi (2009). Technology studies to meet the needs of people with dementia and their caregivers. Journal of Applied Gerontology, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 5–37.
Yin, Robert K. (2014). Case study research: Design and methods. Fifth edition. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications.
Zhu, Feng; and Nathan Furr (2016). Products to Platforms: Making the Leap. Harvard Business Review, vol. 94, no. 4, pp. 18.
Acknowledgments
The work was partly funded by the Norwegian Research Council under its BIA and FORKOMMUNE programs. We thank the counselors and the management of the company for close cooperation and for providing to us their time and effort. We also thank anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. Both authors were working at SINTEF when we conducted the reported study.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Farshchian, B.A., Thomassen, H.E. Co-Creating Platform Governance Models Using Boundary Resources: a Case Study from Dementia Care Services. Comput Supported Coop Work 28, 549–589 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-019-09353-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-019-09353-0