Performing the sharing economy

By L. Richardson. 2015

424 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The sharing economy converges around activities facilitated through digital platforms that enable peer-to-peer access to goods and services. It constitutes an apparent paradox, framed as both part of the capitalist economy and as an alternative. This duplicity necessitates focusing on the performances of the sharing economy: how it simultaneously constructs diverse economic activities whilst also inviting the deconstruction of ongoing practices of dominance. Such performances hold open the question of what the (sharing) economy is, suspending it as a space for both opportunity and critique. Drawing on participant observation at a sharing economy ‘festival’ and analysis of the vocabularies of online platforms, the paper outlines three performances of sharing through community, access and collaboration. It argues through these performances that the sharing economy is contingent and complexly articulated. It has the potential to both shake up and further entrench ‘business-as-usual’ through the ongoing reconfiguration of a divergent range of (economic) activities. Whilst offering an antidote to the narrative of economy as engendering isolation and separation, the sharing economy simultaneously masks new forms of inequality and polarisations of ownership. Nonetheless, the paper concludes in suggesting that by pointing to wider questions concerning participation in, access to and production of resources, the sharing economy should not be dismissed. Instead, it should serve as prompt to engage with ‘digital’ transformations of economy in the spirit of affirmative critique that might enact the promise of doing economy differently.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c74f0fadcb2b8bc8379d75a3acb5591b3cc7b3b

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Citations in the corpus

Unraveling the diverse nature of service quality in a sharing economy: A social exchange theory perspective of Airbnb accommodation (2017, background): “However, Richardson (2015) by examining various definitions of the sharing economy concluded that Airbnb has three key elements of the sharing economy: 1) the company is paradigmatic in offering an online ‘platform’: a digital intermediary that reduces the costs of connecting a diverse array of…”
Promises and paradoxes of the sharing economy: An organizing framework (2017, background): “While the sharing economy experiences fast growth and has a pervasive impact on society, it is presently replete with paradoxes and tensions about its boundaries, effects and logics (Richardson, 2015).”
The Passions and the Interests: Unpacking the 'Sharing Economy' (2016, neutral): “(Richardson, 2015)  Journal article”
Mapping out the sharing economy: A configurational approach to sharing business modeling (2017, background): “…of the novel sharing practices to assist in initiating a social transition Sharing economy Peer-to-peer relationship Collaborative consumption x x x Richardson 2015 Observes the differences in performance of the sharing economy, by looking at how the sharing economy simultaneously constructs…”
Why Do People Consume and Provide Sharing Economy Accommodation?—A Sustainability Perspective (2018, background): “According to Richardson [15], Airbnb, a representative case of a sharing economy, has three key elements as follows; (i) Airbnb offers space resources through an online platform.”
The battle of the buzzwords: A comparative review of the circular economy and the sharing economy concepts (2021, background): “CE emerged as a suitable concept to sustainably transition the capitalist dominated economic model which had caused the crisis (Cave, 2015; Easterling, 2018; IMSA, 2013; Pratt, 2014; Richardson, 2015).”
The “sharing” economy: labor, inequality, and social connection on for‐profit platforms (2017, background): “The term sharing itself became performative (Frenken & Schor, 2017; Richardson, 2015) as well as an object of ridicule by critics (Hill, 2015; Reich, 2015; Slee, 2015).”
Defining the Sharing Economy for Sustainability (2019, background): “Some suggest that this leads to semantic confusion surrounding the sharing economy, which permeates academic and popular discourses [20,21].”