It’s a slow process post-graduation for all of the steps to complete but today I was finally notified that ProQuest officially published my dissertation.
Carle, H. D. (2026). Internationalization of Digital Platform Firms: An Exploration of Resource Orchestration, Platform Accessibility, and Cultural Distance (Publication No. 32575232) [Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. PQDT Open. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3344339956
What is the dissertation about?
While digital platforms have been acknowledged as a market entry strategy (Brouthers et al., 2022; Teece et al., 2022), little research has explored how resource orchestration choices to empower the ecosystem lead to different international performance outcomes (Coviello etal., 2017). This dissertation uses a novel AI-powered qualitative content analysis to analyze developer portal data from 230 global platforms in 57 countries and identifies the suppressive effects of a proposed new construct of “platform accessibility” (PA), measured by investment in a variety of natural language and programming language customization for the host market. It was compared with a sample of 910 total firms in the same markets to demonstrate the validity of platform-specific effects on innternatioal performance.
Key findings:
Moderated by cultural distance, PA negatively predicts international performance, despite evidence that platform resources strongly increase PA.
I examine the differing effects by each platform boundary resource category and identify five new configurations of resource bundle patterns that demonstrate good empirical model fit and differ from prior theory.
Investments in core platform infrastructure and AI resources drive performance outcomes.
An emergent strategic resource investment pattern in AI agentic solutions is identified, alongside a nuanced view of 3 discrete social resource patterns.
Four clusters of platform firm resource orchestration behaviors are identified
The effects of poor language-market fit are also explored with cultural distance that shows specific regional area variance.
Accessing information and citations
Looks like the indexing so it can be updated to all the important places like Google Scholar, Web of Science, ResearchGate etc. will still take some time. I know a few people have reached out with interest to skim it because of the findings on digital platform resource orchestration and some of the novel methods elements in adapting Weber (1990) to a human + multi AI-agent coder approach to qualitative content analysis. The open access link above will let you access the text while it’s still on its publishing journey.
Replication instructions and the source scrapers and coding scripts are also available on my Github with my full codebook https://github.com/hdcarle/Digital-Platform-Boundary-Resources