Vili Lehdonvirta
Professor of Economic Sociology, University of Oxford; Professor of Technology Policy, Aalto University |
Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and Professor of Technology Policy at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland. His research deals with the economic and political implications of digital platforms and infrastructures. From 2015 to 2021 he led a European Research Council funded project titled iLabour, which investigated digital labour platforms. In 2024 he won a European Research Council grant to study the geopolitics of cloud computing. Lehdonvirta is the author of Cloud Empires: How digital platforms are overtaking the state and how we can regain control (2022) and co-author of Virtual Economies: Design and analysis (2014), both published by MIT Press. His books have been translated to Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. Lehdonvirta has served on the European Commission’s Expert Group on the Online Platform Economy and the High-Level Expert Group on Digital Transformation and EU Labour Markets. He has previously worked at the London School of Economics, the University of Tokyo, and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. Before his academic career he worked as a software developer.