Amazon

Reviews / Votes

An essential contribution to critical scholarship on platform capitalism, and on Amazon as its titan. Through its transdisciplinary approach, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of Amazon's apparatus, exposing the ways in which the company consolidates power through technological innovation, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation. * Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization * Technology-driven web development led to the creation of e-commerce and platform-based businesses, which occupy these new spaces and serve largely virtual markets. Amazon specifically developed multiple products, services, and technologies for a wide array of consumers, and the Amazon family of products evolved into its own culture. Fueled by social media and the pandemic, Amazon's culture now links its various product platforms, giving rise to new business opportunities in the spaces between platforms. This integrated culture has rewritten many of the rules for a "traditional" business. The editors of this volume assembled a series of related essays spotlighting various aspects of this culture and outlining exactly what Amazon has built, acquired, and accumulated. The authors examine Amazon's functionality as an "unregulated monopoly," its labor and safety practices, and its social good and harm. This volume is one of the few places where readers can view Amazon both as a whole and through its parts. It will facilitate fact-based discussion of Amazon's benefits and liabilities and new mechanisms and regulations to deal with the various impacts of this multifaceted, global company. Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty and professionals * Choice Reviews * Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital is a highly readable, provocative, and insightful collection of perspectives on Amazon's digital dominance. Featuring work ranging from antitrust analysis to artistic interventions, the book is impressively well-curated, critiquing undue concentration of platform power while sketching paths toward more equitable and democratic commerce. -- Frank Pasquale, Law professor at Brooklyn Law School and author of The Black Box Society and New Laws of Robotics Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital offers a set of investigations ingeniously put together to depict Amazon's multifaceted history, from its (intellectual) monopolistic behaviors, its performative effects on consumption and how it deepens ecological crises to its workers' struggles and social and artistic activism to raise awareness and fightback. This is a must-read book for those willing to know more about how digital technologies and big data underlie every single corner of Amazon's business, from its e-commerce marketplace to its black-box digital services on the cloud to its digital technologies that organize logistics and control its workers. -- Dr. Cecilia Rikap, City University of London, author of The Digital Innovation Race and Amazon: A Story of Accumulation through Intellectual Rentiership and Predation In recent years, no single institution has become more ubiquitous, more central to the material culture and everyday commercial life of people across much of the globe, than Amazon. Nobody studying contemporary economics, culture, society, or politics can avoid the need to say something about it. The diverse and rigorous contributions to this indispensable volume do exactly that, from a wide range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. As such, this book offers a tremendously impressive set of insights into the nature of contemporary capitalism and power. -- Jeremy Gilbert, author of Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World