The ubiquity of digital platforms is undeniable, as is their significance in enabling efficient transactions and expanding the scope of interactions and possibilities across international markets. The realisation of intended value co-creation and appropriation, and to effectively scale up to accrue the benefits of network effects, depends on how platform users construe and conceive of the digital business models and their everyday organising logic and activities. Yet, the social and cognitive distance between the predominantly developed-context origin of these ‘born global’ business models and that of underdeveloped market contexts gives rise to variations in how meanings and understandings are formed and framed. Notwithstanding this important socio-cognitive dynamics, scholarly focus on digital platforms has been on their transactional and technological features and impacts and often conceives of their governance mechanisms as a set of operational constructs that are designed to manage users and platform participation. These emphases, while useful for understanding the wayfinding and managerial control of digital platforms in diverse international markets, largely ignore the extent to which the organising of these digital platforms and their participatory practices is a contested site, shaped by the interpretive process of users. Drawing on the recent turn to meaning-making in contemporary social theory as a lens, the thesis explores how the collective contest over the interpretation of value creation and capture may offer a set of contradictory frames and how, albeit challenging, these meaning conflicts can serve as an adaptable strategic resource for localising digital business models. The study develops its contribution based on a case study of a second-entrant digital platform within the Ghanaian ridesharing industry, a relatively underdeveloped market context. Adopting an exploratory research design, data for inquiry comes from interview data with nine (9) current and former managers of the platform firm and 44 platform drivers. This was supplemented with secondary insights from publicly available data sources such as digital news articles, reports, and documents. Three main findings emerged from the study. First, in delineating how ridesharing platform firms and their business models play out in the contexts of underdeveloped markets, the study identified3K. Amissah, PhD Thesis, Aston University 2026salient interrelated elements that show digital platform deployment as a foundational meaning phase whereby platform firms attempt to establish the initial interpretive conditions within which their co-creation logic and appropriation activities can be understood and engaged with underdeveloped markets. Second, the findings revealed three distinct but durationally indivisible sites of contestation—Pax Prima Phenomenon, Interactional Chaos and Identity Speciation through which both groups actively construed their preferred interpretations, consequently disrupting value co-creation and appropriation expectations. The findings further revealed the resultant actions that followed drivers’ collective interpretations and found them to be subversive in nature. Third, the findings also identified and showed how the firms’ organising standards, requirements and activities may constitutively facilitate or impede the alignment of differing meaning frames from platform entry to commercialisation and survival within the institutional and socio-cultural conditions of the underdeveloped market context. Altogether, the study makes contributions to the digital platform, meaning-making, value co-creation and platform governance literature, by illustrating the deployment of digital platforms into underdeveloped market contexts as an interpretative process from entry through to commercialisation and survival in those contexts. It extends the understanding of how digital business models underpinned by co-creation logic are initially transferred and framed, contested to yield conflicting meaning frames, and divergent interpretations aligned and stabilised to restore the operational efficiency of these models in underdeveloped markets.
Exploring the Meaning-Making of Digital Platforms in Contexts of Underdeveloped Markets and Institutions
Amissah, K. (Author). Jan 2026
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy