How platform ecosystems reproduce entrepreneurialism

This study conceptualises platform ecosystems as ideological infrastructures of entrepreneurialism: arrangements that embed entrepreneurial logic within the organisational conditions of participation, rather than merely enabling entrepreneurial activity. A comparative critical discourse analysis of a bounded official-document corpus spanning Amazon Marketplace and Shopify identifies three mechanisms—subject constitution, asymmetry naturalisation, and alternative foreclosure—through which divergent platform architectures project convergent ideological framings: dependence is recast as autonomy, asymmetry as neutrality or mutuality, and constraint as opportunity, claims that the analysis bounds throughout to ideological projection rather than to participant internalisation. The paper's contribution is a mechanism-level account of how platform architecture performs this ideological work: entrepreneurialism is reproduced not because platforms persuade participants of its merits but because it is built into the infrastructure through which participation is organised, a conclusion that carries the practical implication that counteracting entrepreneurialism's developmental consequences requires intervention at the level of infrastructure as well as discourse.