Empowering and Resisting in a Sharing Economy: Two Sides of the Same Coin.
| Autor | Dal Bo, Gicelda Julia |
Introduction
The sharing economy (SE) is a new economy that combines several business initiatives under a single umbrella. Some are not divergent from conventional models. Organizations inside the old economy headed the phenomenon, such as Zipcar (Eckhardt & Bardhi, 2015); Car2Go (Firnkorn & Muller, 2011) or DriveNow (Belk, 2014). There are also models tagged as hybrid businesses. Usually, they are for-profit platforms based on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks models such as Uber and Airbnb (Cohen & Sundararajan, 2015). Finally, within this umbrella, we may also find actual P2P models. They work without profit intermediaries, such as FreeCycle that swaps goods (Krush, Pennington, Fowler, & Mittelstaedt, 2015) and OurGoods offering knowledge exchange (Schor, Fitzmaurice, Carfagna, Attwood-Charles, & Poteat, 2016).
With so many business initiatives under a single umbrella, the SE role in a sustainable economy is taken as controversial and paradoxical (Verboven & Vanherck, 2016). There are reasons to acclaim SE as sustainable businesses and to strengthen the perception of its ability to reduce environmental impacts (Fremstad, 2017). SE offers innovative (sometimes, disruptive) business opportunities and appeals to ecological awareness as it encourages new forms of consumption (Bonciu & Balgar, 2016; Heinrichs, 2013). Similarly, SE has to do with anti-consumption movements (Hamari, Sjoklint, & Ukkonen, 2015). SE's dark side of critical topics calls attention to the negative externalities like the rebound-effect on behavioral and systemic levels as the new economy moves from old to new models (Verboven & Vanherck, 2016). Also, there is a discussion on one-sided advantages endorsed by regulatory and market failures that weakens relevant social aspects such as labor relations (Malhotra & Van Alstyne, 2014) and their pathway to a more commercially-oriented economy (Martin, 2016).
Such SE trajectories shed light on its ambiguities as well as provide opportunities to investigate the phenomenon looking forward to finding out how these trajectories are (or are not) talking to each other. Some authors bring attention to power exercise as a means to promote or influence changes (Avelino, 2017; Avelino & Rotmans, 2011). Aligned with this, Martin (2016) conducted research to identify narrative framings to empower and to resist SE. While his study aimed to identify framings without integrating them, we look forward to fitting together resisting and empowering framings as complementary strengths. The idea is to seek what is shared between the two strengths (resisting and empowering), identifying the different ways that both narratives give meaning to the resources they apply. A set of strengths which affect social actors and their narratives produces power relationships, and it is central to recognize such dynamics (Silva, Carrieri, & Souza, 2012).
Being so, understanding resistance and empowerment as mutually constitutive interactions, we propose the following research question: How are narrative framings to empower and to resist connected in a SE context? Our goal is to offer further reflections on current discussions in regards to SE's path-splitting view (Geissinger, Laurell, Oberg, & Sandstrom, 2019; Heinrichs, 2013; Schor & Attwood-Charles, 2017). For developing it, we use the narrative framings to empower and to resist (Martin, 2016), seeking to find some relational issue (same coin) between them (two sides). The results take this into account, attempting to see how and which framings are connected. We expect the SE framework developed herein to contribute both in theoretical and practical ways. By achieving a more comprehensive understanding of what is at stake, we propose there is a reasoning to the narrative framings, from a broader perspective.
The next section describes the empirical and theoretical context of the research.
Theoretical Background: Narrative Framings on Sharing Economy
Our society keeps tracking the exponential growth of the Sharing Economy (SE) over all types of economic activities, including alternative ones. SE encompasses a variety of models, in complexity and scope, as it combines cutting-edge communication technology and networked communities (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012; Dowling & Kent, 2015). It can be described as an alternative economy arrangement which shares underused assets and reformulates traditional market behavior, such as renting, lending and swapping (C. S. de Freitas, Petrini, & Silveira, 2016). Its emergence is associated with the increase of online platforms and the exponential growth of start-ups like Uber and Airbnb (e.g., Avital et al., 2014; Hong & Vicdan, 2016; Martin, Evans, & Karvonen, 2018). The SE shares resources in billions of dollars (Martin, 2016) and estimates predict a global leap from $15b in 2015 to $335b in 2025 (Price Waterhouse, 2015).
Still, its purpose stands on fostering collaborative ways in the opposite direction from business approaches that are no longer tenable (e.g., Heylighen, 2017; Sprague, 2015). Such a particular point of view makes it possible to think on SE with the notion of a sustainable development meant to be better than capitalism (R. de C. M. Freitas, Nelsis, & Nunes, 2012). That is, SE proposes to meet human needs through a path as distinct as that oriented to the market (e.g., Benkler, 2006; Martin & Upham, 2016; Rifkin, 2014). Therefore, there are those who understand that SE adopts disruptive practices evoking market intelligence focused on sustainable development (Heinrichs, 2013). Although one may see sustainable development as inherent to SE (Botsman & Rogers, 2011), it seems to not directly imply that it is moving away from this idea of market orientation.
To the contrary, SE has been seen as "constructing the right kinds of markets, as opposed to getting the right policies enacted" (Konefal, 2013, p. 343) aligned with the understanding of a reframed SE as an economic opportunity (Martin, 2016). A softened view on sustainable development makes it possible to show SE that aims to "reconcile economic growth with human development and environmental quality" (R. de C. M. Freitas et al., 2012, p. 48). Of course, coming to terms with this reconciled view does not necessarily lead to harmony, nor avoid harsh interests revealing internal (Boyd & Kietzmann, 2014) or external impacts (Heylighen, 2017) either negative or positive. Instead of reshaped pathway to sustainable development (Heinrichs, 2013), one can doubt if it is an "economy that benefits everyone" (Morozov, 2013, p. 3) and question whether SE effectively grants better quality of life. However, this does not mean it is not going to take place. There appears to be potential to, intentionally, promote structural changes for sustainable development (Benford & Snow, 2000; Smith & Raven, 2012).
SE arguments (still) unlikely to agree
The field of studies on SE seems to lead the discussion to the controversies generated by the notion of neoliberalism. Studies reveal disagreement in aspects ranging from relationships with the market, government, workers, consumers (users), to sustainability and environmental issues (Murillo, Buckland, & Val, 2017). The assumption taken for granted, as far as digital platforms are concerned, is that there should be minimum state interference in the market, i.e., the neoliberal idea of the less regulated the market, the wider the benefits to shareholders (McKee, 2017). This is inherent in the way corporations such as Uber are replacing current jobs with precarious gigs that lack protection and legal benefits (Zwick, 2018). It turns out, advocate McKee (2017), that such platforms ended up being the result of self-regulated rules adopted by SE's new models and state regulatory laws. The logic of an inclusive and empowering job is still not clear and brings instability and tension: the most influential and powerful SE firms are private and profit-driven but still not as taxed and regulated as the traditional ones (Laurell & Sandstrom, 2017). There is no doubt that Uber (and similar apps) expanded its competitive advantage over the taxi industry using information technology to identify gaps in law enforcement (Zwick, 2018). SE seems to operate between the voids of law and societal vulnerability (Dreyer, Ludeke-Freund, Hamann, & Faccer, 2017).
Technological innovation becomes the trigger through which digital platforms begin to change the world of work as it was previously known (Donini, Forlivesi, Rota, & Tullini, 2017). To check on how far this revolutionary innovation will go, a theoretical body of still inconclusive studies and conflicting views is on its way (Fabo, Karanovic, & Dukova, 2017). Only as such revolutions continue can one assess whether trends will prove themselves as being a drive to "undermine labor laws and other regulations, transfer industry risk to the individual driver, and lower industry wage and labor standards" (Zwick, 2018, p. 687). It turns out that the relationship between corporation, worker (partner) and customer (user) has become blurred and has given rise to specific problems that regulation has been unable to keep up with as SE advances (Griffith, van Esch, & Trittenbach, 2018).
The generation of damages or costs arising from the relationship between the drivers and the for-profit platforms (like Uber) shows the way of how over-exploiting work also has side effects (Heylighen, 2017). Over time it seems that digital platform exchanges become less disruptive and more similar to standard services, meaning positive and negative implications for sustainability (Schor & Attwood-Charles, 2017). Recent studies have shown more or less sustainability depending on how a corporation chooses to use available resources to strengthen the dominant market logic or to reshape it (e.g., Bohnsack, Pinkse, & Kolk, 2014; De Stefano, 2015; Hockerts & Wustenhagen, 2010; Sosna, Trevinyo-Rodriguez, & Velamuri, 2010).
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