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Sharing Economy
(2020)
The sharing economy can be understood as a web of markets in which individuals exchange goods and services. Market exchange is typically based on transactions mediated by a digital platform operated by an organization (Mair and Reischauer 2017). The multiple legal forms, orientations, and modes of compensation these organizations adopt combined with the broad range of markets including food, tool, and ride-sharing exemplify the potential of the sharing economy to nurture alternative forms of organizing with social purpose (Mair and Rathert forthcoming) to affect the economy, society, and the environment in new ways (Frenken and Schor 2017).
We are currently witnessing a new wave of the digital economy. A prime example is the sharing economy where an organization operates a platform for its online community, the sum of individuals who interact to exchange goods and services. The sharing economy blurs several boundaries of economic life – a fact that extant theory on platform organizing has yet paid little attention. We argue to consider two aspects of the sharing economy and revisit related theory to address this lacuna. First, we revive the concept of hybrid community to denote a variant of an online community that mirrors the boundary-blurring nature of the sharing economy. In a hybrid community, individuals interact both online and offline (instead of only online) and consume as well as produce. Second, we revisit the range of strategic responses suggested by extant literature to minimize the dependence of a platform organization on its hybrid community and show that the sharing economy requires management research to adapt and potentially recast existing claims.
To date, management research has paid little attention to dynamics of the sharing economy: how markets for sharing resources emerge and change, and the intended and unintended consequences of resource sharing. We propose a definition of the sharing economy that brings the role of organizations as infrastructure providers to the fore and helps us to assess the culturally rooted pluralism of forms and practices in these organizations. We introduce two perspectives in research on organizational institutionalism that focus on culture and pluralism – institutional complexity and institutional work – and argue that unpacking the pluralism of organizational forms and practices is critical to examine the dynamics of the sharing economy. We propose an agenda for research to capture the dynamics of the sharing economy at the organizational, field, and inter-field level. Such an agenda helps to document and analyze how the sharing economy manifests and evolves across various economic systems and has the potential to refine and recast existing management theory.