In this online conversation, Jonas Pentzien will present his research report The Politics of Platform Cooperativism. 

This study identifies political and legislative drivers and obstacles for platform co-ops (i.e. the politics of platform cooperativism) in three heterogeneous political contexts – the United States (U.S.), Germany, and France. Based on expert interviews and a comparative policy analysis, the study increases our understanding of the obstacles that democratically owned and governed platforms in these three countries face, as well as at sketching out possible ways for addressing them. As such, the study not only helps to enhance our understanding of co-op-specific state-market-relations in the platform economy, but also, from a transdisciplinary point of view, to gain a better understanding of the policies that work in order to strengthen the emergence of platform co-ops – and the ones that do not. Taken together, the following overarching research questions guide the investigation:

• What are the political and legislative drivers and obstacles for platform cooperativism in the U.S., Germany, and France?
• Which governmental activities are more or less beneficial for the emergence and proliferation of platform cooperativism?

Jonas Pentzien will give us a summary of his research work, followed by a Q&A.

Jonas Pentzien is a researcher at the Berlin-based Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW), where he investigates and compares the rise of the platform economy in different institutional contexts. A political scientist by training, he is interested in the role political institutions play in processes of technology-driven change. What mechanisms do governments employ in order to adapt to and influence these changes? Do these mechanisms differ between countries? If yes, are there maybe other platform economies besides the often-discussed Chinese and American models? Since 2017, Jonas is also a member of platforms2share, a five-year long research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. As part of this project, he tries to identify the framework conditions that allow democratically owned and governed platforms to thrive. Jonas has studied Political Economy and Comparative Politics at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA), Free University of Berlin (Germany) and Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and has taught classes on the Digital Economy at the Free University Berlin. Jonas is a fellow of the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School in New York, USA.