11/30
Monday, November 30, 2026, 10:00–11:00 AM ET
online
REGISTRATION
MC: Salonie Muralidhara Hiriyur
Vera Vidal, Jonas Pentzien, Louis Cousin, and Alejandro Fortuny-Sicart, four ICDE research affiliates, just finished their PhDs. Each one asked a question about power and cooperation in the digital economy. From platform capitalism’s resistance to real change, to worker buyouts and meta-organizations steering whole sectors, their work maps where democratic alternatives to dominant platforms can take hold.
VERA VIDAL
Vera is in charge of the intermediation of practitioners and researchers at La Coop des Communs, a French non-profit.
Her dissertation examines how platform cooperatives manage tensions between their values-driven missions and the strategic choices required for economic viability, and asks whether, in doing so, they redefine what it means to be a platform. Based on fieldwork in Barcelona (2018–2022), the research studies public policies supporting platform cooperatives alongside two initiatives, Fairbnb and Som Mobilitat. Institutional support turns out to be crucial but comes with constraints: platform cooperatives don’t simply choose between economic viability and social or environmental goals, they arbitrate between competing social goals, facing trade-offs in governance, technology, and impact.
JONAS PENTZIEN
Jonas is Head of the Research Field “Business, Value Chains and Consumption” at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) in Berlin, where he develops sustainability-oriented transformation pathways for the digital economy.
His dissertation examines why growing contestation of platform capitalism has imposed only limited constraints on platform power, and what consequences that contestation still produces. Drawing on comparative research in the U.S., Germany, and France, it studies two forms of contestation, regulation and cooperative entrepreneurship, and argues that contestatory projects are often selectively reformatted through existing institutional arrangements and incumbent-controlled infrastructures, a mechanism he calls absorption. This creates an uneven opportunity structure in which projects compatible with prevailing arrangements are more likely to succeed, while more transformative alternatives stay disadvantaged. For this event, Jonas focuses on cooperative entrepreneurship and what these dynamics mean for the limits of building democratic alternatives to dominant platform firms.
LOUIS COUSIN
Louis currently serves as Course Instructor and Research Assistant at Laval University, TÉLUQ University (QC, Canada), and Saint Mary’s University (NS, Canada). He is also a partner at Demos cooperative (AB, Canada).
“Weather the Storm: Digital Innovation under Umbrella Organizations,” Louis’ thesis, examines how meta-organizations, such as federations and associations in the social and solidarity economy (SSE), shape digital transformation beyond the level of individual organizations. Drawing on an integrative framework combining meta-organization theory, meso-level governance, and information infrastructure studies, the thesis explores how collective actors exercise power to support, steer, or constrain digital innovation. Based on a qualitative case study of inter-organizational digital infrastructure projects in the water management sector, it shows how meta-organizations act as sectoral architects, balancing collaboration, control, and autonomy while navigating technological and institutional change.
ALEJANDRO FORTUNY-SICART
Alejandro has just defended his Ph.D. at the University of Vigo (Spain) as part of the Post-Growth Innovation Lab.
His PhD examines how alternative, self-managed organizations can emerge as alternatives to conventional multinational corporate models, focusing on organizations that combine economic activity with democratic and social objectives. Through in-depth ethnographic observation, archival analysis, and semi-structured interviews, he studied two cases: Scop-Ti, a tea and infusions factory in France that workers took over and turned into a cooperative to prevent its closure and relocation, and CoopCycle, a platform cooperative supporting worker-owned bicycle-delivery cooperatives. Essentially, the thesis examines how workers and co-op members create and maintain alternative forms of organization, what tensions arise, and how they’re managed.
Salonie Muralidhara Hiriyur is a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies whose work focuses on gender, labor, social movements, and platform economies, informed by her earlier work with the SEWA Cooperative Federation in India. Google Scholar