The Business Discipline and the Second Structural Shift: Platform-Mediated Small Firms at Scale

I’ve been reflecting on how the business discipline evolves—and whether it is keeping pace with the structural changes in the economy we study.

We have already lived through one major transition: from manufacturing to services.

That transition delivered clear gains. Output increased. Efficiency improved. Entire new sectors emerged.

But it also came with consequences. Income inequality rose. In part, this was driven by increasingly competitive labour markets that placed downward pressure on wages, even as firm profits and shareholder returns increased.

The Business discipline responded—but largely within existing disciplinary silos: marketing, finance, operations, HR, strategy—each deepening its own domain.

Service research, to its credit, became a more integrative agenda in its own right. But overall, the structure of the discipline remained intact. That made sense for the world we were studying.

A second, deeper transition

We are now in the midst of another shift: from services to global, transnational platforms—cloud, coordination systems, and AI.

This transition is not just technological. It is structural.

• Firms are becoming thinner, with coordination externalised into platforms

• Small firms can be global from day one

• In many economies, small firms account for ~99% of firms and roughly half the workforce

• More individuals are forming their own companies—able to access capital, infrastructure, and markets through platforms.

But more importantly, we are seeing the rise of platform-mediated small firms operating at scale.

These are not traditional SMEs. They function as an “amplified labour force” - asset-light, globally connected, dependent on external coordination infrastructures (cloud, marketplaces, payments, data layers). In some cases profitable within months and capable of reaching scale without becoming large firms. Scale is no longer achieved through internal growth. It is achieved through external coordination.

A shift in the unit of analysis

If this is becoming the dominant form, then the “firm” is no longer the only centre of analysis. The real unit is the market-mediated system of coordination in which all firms operate.

Here, workflows span multiple organisations, decisions propagate across platforms, value is co-created across actors. The boundaries of the firm are shifting—from inside the organisation to the market.

The limitation of our current business disciplines

Our disciplines remain powerful—but they are structured around separations that no longer hold.

We tend to think marketing shapes demand, operations manages supply, finance allocates capital, strategy integrates at the firm level. They still do.

But in a platform-mediated economy of millions of small (and large) firms:

Marketing decisions also shape operational workflows; Financial structures also shape strategic possibility, Platforms collapse functional boundaries and AI coordinates across them all. The phenomenon is integrated.

Our thinking, as a discipline, is not. But we need to change that, because our business graduates have to be better prepared for either their own firms or working in integrated, “thinner” firms.

Preserve the disciplines. Change the agenda.

The answer is not to abandon disciplines. The core knowledge remains essential

• Marketing: value and exchange

• Finance: capital and risk

• Operations: flow and efficiency

• Strategy: positioning and advantage

• Etc

But they cannot remain analytically isolated, especially in the way we educate our students.

What we need is an integrative research and education agenda organised around:

1. Markets as coordination systems

Not just sites of exchange, but infrastructures through which small firms achieve scale.

2. Platform-mediated ecosystems

Where firms, platforms, and individuals jointly produce outcomes.

3. Cross-functional propagation

How decisions in one domain reshape outcomes across the system.

4. Data and AI as coordination layers

The mechanisms through which workflows and exchanges are organised.

The issue is deeper than integration - it is taking on the lens of market ecosystems as systems of coordination, where value is co-created across actors, workflows span organisational boundaries, markets organise not just exchange, but production and coordination

If that is the case, then our disciplines are not obsolete. They are partial lenses on a larger phenomenon.

Design before practice

There is also a second shift we have yet to make.

The Business discipline still largely analyses what exists and teach practices based on that analysis. But in a world of platform-mediated systems, we are increasingly designing the systems themselves: platforms, market rules, coordination mechanisms, data infrastructures

This requires a different order:

Design → Practice → Analysis

Not as a replacement, but as a rebalancing.

Why this matters

When platform-mediated small firms at scale become a dominant form of economic activity, we can no longer centre our teaching on employment in large, integrated firms or study business functions in isolation. If the last transition increased inequality, this one will reshape it again—through access to platforms, data, and coordination power. The question is whether the business discipline is equipped to understand—and shape—that outcome.

A reframing

Business is no longer a set of functions within the firm. It is the study—and design—of how market ecosystems coordinate value across distributed actors. And that requires us not to discard disciplines, but to reintegrate them around the phenomenon that now defines the economy—and place design at the centre of inquiry.

And perhaps, an opportunity: We have been here before.

The shift from manufacturing to services gave rise to entirely new ways of thinking about value, exchange, and organisation. Today, we are at the beginning of another such moment. With platform-mediated small firms operating at scale, with markets coordinating workflows across boundaries, and with data and AI reshaping how decisions are made—this is no longer a marginal adjustment to the discipline.

It is a chance to rethink it. And that makes it, once again an exciting time to study, to design, and to practice the business discipline.