Handbook of the Sharing Economy

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* Book: Handbook of the Sharing Economy. Edited by Russell W. Belk, Giana M. Eckhardt and Fleura Bardhi. Elgar, 2019

URL = https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788110532/9781788110532.xml

"With the radical growth in the ubiquity of digital platforms, the sharing economy is here to stay. This Handbook explores the nature and direction of the sharing economy, interrogating its key dynamics and evolution over the past decade and critiquing its effect on society."


Contents

Excerpt

Full editor's intro at https://www.elgaronline.com/downloadpdf/edcoll/9781788110532/9781788110532.00005.xml

"The sharing economy, defined as a social and economic system of transactions in which individuals use third-party technology platforms that match providers and users to exchange goods, services, or ideas in a manner that does not transfer ownership (Eckhardt et al. forthcoming), is coming of age. It has been more than a decade since the advent of exemplar platforms such as Airbnb and Uber came into existence, and since pioneering academic thought began exploring sharing (e.g., Belk 2007). Besides the big players such as TransferWise in the fintech space and Grubhub Seamless in the food delivery space, there are also many smaller players that are leading innovations in the sharing economy, such as OpenBazaar, able to compete against the big players because of blockchain technology (De Filippi 2017). This Handbook aims to explicate what the phenomenon of the sharing economy is, as it can be treated in wildly different ways in different literatures; how this economy has evolved over the past 15 years (for example, its growth and sectors); and what the key dynamics are as we move into the next decade. We do this from an interdisciplinary perspective, examining aspects such as labor and governance in addition to consumption. In this introductory chapter, we seek to examine how the sharing economy has developed, what its future might be, and what the consequences of the sharing economy are to businesses, consumers, and society.

A key issue that many of the chapters in this Handbook of the Sharing Economy address is the paradoxical character of its two components. “Sharing” implies a moral economy of “sharing in” within a small community of close others (Belk 2010), while “economy” implies a market economy where access-based consumption takes place within a potentially large community of distant others (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012).

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While these perspectives reflect a variety of ways of dealing with the paradox of the sharing economy, they all agree that the sharing economy is something new and significant, even if it draws on millennia of the coexisting, but largely separate, moral and market economies (Eckhardt and Bardhi 2016; Fontaine 2014; see also Chapter 8 by Gruen and Mimoun, and Chapter 10 by Dalli and Fortezza, in this volume). What is new is the marketization of sharing, which has greatly upset the status quo in several markets.

The chapters in this Handbook broaden the spatial and conceptual scope and understanding of the sharing economy beyond the North American context that has dominated prior research. Current chapters include cases and studies from regions such as Southern Europe, the Nordic countries, and the Arabian Gulf. For example, Baz Radwan et al. (Chapter 6) examine the emergence of the sharing economy in Arab countries with their distinct histories and traditions of ownership, religious sharing, and communal property rights. These authors trace the history of sharing practices to the nomad Bedouin tribes who had to rely on alternative forms of exchange and shared consumption among themselves as well as with other, non-kin travelers in order to cope with the dire natural settings.

Islamic religion also had an influence, through the practice of zakat that structures formal sharing, informal sadaqah sharing, and the hospitality traditions of the region (Sobh et al. 2013).

The Handbook chapters also advance our understanding of the exchange practices that have proliferated via the sharing economy. Widlok (Chapter 3), for example, argues that practices associated with the sharing economy represent a “crowd-based capitalism” that goes beyond the duality of non-commercial gift-exchange versus commercial capitalist transactions. He conceptualizes such practices as forms of communal redistribution, pooling, and sharing that are neither mainstream market transactions nor instances of gift-exchange relationships. He argues that when cultural practices are transferred into digital environments, they rely on social practices that are already established but are constantly in danger of being undermined.

Dalli and Fortezza (Chapter 10) examine moneyless market exchanges of bartering and swapping that have proliferated via digital platforms in Italy. They argue that bartering represents a hybrid practice integrating market transactions with social exchange (see also Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992). Valor and Papaoikonomou (Chapter 11) study another moneyless practice: of timebanks, where time becomes an alternative currency for the exchange of services in Spain and Greece. However, they find that timebanks are not successful because they fail to institutionalize the hybrid logics of social and market exchange, as well as to move their participants away from the balanced or negative market reciprocity they are socialized in (Sahlins 1972). This hybrid logic can also be construed as reflecting the liminal nature of the market economy, caught halfway between market and moral economies (Scaraboto 2015).

A further treatment of the liminal nature of the sharing economy is found in Chapter 8 by Gruen and Mimoun who examine how the access-based workplace and the gig economy are transforming the practice of work. Their chapter is based on ethnographies of two new emerging workspaces: the contexts of coworking and cohoming in Paris and London. They find that the collaborative and informal design of such workplaces fosters intimate and informal relationships that often lead to personal friendships as well as professional collaborations. Further, they find that the logic of hospitality, that shapes cohoming (in which strangers pay to work in someone’s home), does not inhibit but rather supports personal interactions and relationships. Through the study of a variety of practices and contexts, these chapters show the diversity of sharing economy practices and interactions."

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