New organizational forms may emerge from interstices between multiple organizational fields. In the context of the platform economy, organizational models are discussed as more just and sustainable alternatives to dominant platform models, that combine ideas from three fields: The fields evolving around blockchain technology, the issues of cooperativism and sharing. While attributed a high potential, the spread and legitimacy of such models are low. We expect that one reason for the current lack of legitimacy is that the three fields have so far developed rather independently, with little overlaps on a relational and symbolic level. Such overlaps would be needed for organizational forms combining ideas to emerge. In this exploratory study, we therefore reconstruct the relational and symbolic structure of the three fields as observable on the World Wide Web. Visualizing the resulting network and use of combinations of vocabularies, we observe three organizational fields with connections between them and cross-adoption of language, but at a limited degree. With these insights we add to discussions on current and potential developments of the platform economy and contribute to theorizing and understanding field overlaps. We provide a methodological approach to study multiple fields on relational and symbolic levels.

https://www.egosnet.org/2020/hamburg/Virtual%20Colloquium_Joining%20Instructions