Organizational Control Of Platform Enterprises:A Cross Case-Study

Sangeet Paul Choudary foretold: “As a business and organizational model,the platform is becoming one of the most important economic and social developments of our time”,in his book “Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy”.In his opinion,the platform model underlies the success of many of today's biggest,fastest-growing,and most powerfully disruptive companies.What's more,platforms are beginning to transform the lives and relationships of internal employees,leaders,and external consumers.Doubtlessly,Choudary's insights are confirmed in many platform companies.However,more profound changes are transformations in organizational areas such as internal relations,power distribution,and institutional arrangements of platform companies.Benefiting fromevolution capability and network effects,in the era of internet,platform can meet enterprise's iterative innovationand diversified customer needs.The underlying reason lies in the essential difference between the platform and the pyramid organization.Platform companies have a flat organizational structure,timely information transfer,diversified employee relationships,more active individuals and different decision makers.All of this points to a growing sense of employee autonomy.Traditional organizational control theory that designed to solve the problem of mass standardized production,cost management,and production efficiency,cannot solve the problem of autonomy.Therefore,the enormous challenge for platform companies is the huge tension that individuals tend to escape from organizational control,but organizations need to achieve corporate profits through control,between individual autonomy and organizational control.The tension has become a control paradox that needs to be solved in the field of organizational control.The assumptions that the control paradox relies on have changed.Traditional organizational control theoryis based on three basic assumptions,including the legality of the authority based on employment relationships,clear criteria,as well as measurable results.As we all know,platform companies emphasize individual innovation and iterationinnovation.Wherefore,The assumptions of the control paradoxnot only lacks formal authority and measurement standards but also emphasizes the autonomy of all participants.Driven by the urgency ofcontrol paradox and the limitations of organizational control theory,research of organizational control of platform companies is increasingly important.Therefore,This articlechoose Haier,Handu Group,xiaomi's ecological chain,Plateno to conduct an exploratory research.We collect data through secondary data and web crawlers.Firstly,we will explore the mechanisms of control in each platform enterprise case,by Single case study.Secondly,we will identify the key characteristics of innovation tasks,and take a close look at the relationship between innovation tasks(boundary flexibility&iteration speed)and the choice of organizational control,by Cross-case study.Thirdly,this article answers the following two questions:(1)What is the mechanisms of the organization control of the platform enterprise?(2)How boundary flexibility and iteration speedinfluences the choice of these mechanisms?After a deeply comparative analysis,We found that organizational control has not disappeared with the decline of formal authority.Instead,new control elements have emerged,including macro-input control,macro-process control,macro-output control,as well as micro-input control,micro-process control,micro-output control.Finally,we also presents the relationship betweenboundary flexibility&iteration speedandorganizational control.