Sharing economy: becoming an Uber driver in a developing country.
| Autor | Valente, Eduardo |
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Introduction
Sharing economy (SE) can be defined as a sharing socio-economic system, which includes the production and consumption of goods and services. Much in the literature of SE has focused on understanding consumers, which is known as collaborative consumption (Botsman & Rogers, 2011; Cheng, 2016; Silveira, Petrini, & dos Santos, 2016); and the producer's perspective has not yet been described in the discussion of what SE really means. The main study about production in SE focuses on understanding people's motivation toward sharing, such study comprehends distributive decentralized means of production of shareable assets (Benkler, 2004). Furthermore, it is possible to understand how intangible open source internet production has occurred with the paradigmatic cases of Wikipedia and Linux (Lessig, 2008).
Important research in the field of SE has put effort into an anthropological approach toward differentiating sharing from gift and commodity exchange (Belk, 2007, 2010, 2014). This has recently led to an academic discussion on mutuality as a distinctive characteristic of sharing (Arnould & Rose, 2016; Belk, 2016). There is in the academia a paradoxical perspective regarding this theme, since some scholars believe that SE is not sharing at all (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012). Such paradox brings back the conceptual discussion that aims to differentiate SE considering its different perspectives--which go beyond consumption--leading to the necessary advancements in the theoretical foundations of this research area, which is still under development (Silveira, Petrini, & dos Santos, 2016).
Therefore, the concept of sharing--in the new business era of decentralized internet production and intangible assets--may be understood as a form of micro capitalism (Petrie, 2016). Sharing is the foundation of a market where the surplus production capacity of personal goods can be used in different businesses in which individuals look for income generation--some scholars call this phenomenon sharing market (Valente & Patrus, 2019).
Other relevant research areas of SE focus on the car transportation business related to sustainable mobility, specifically car sharing. Much has been discussed since the early 1990s with the emergence of automobile co-ownership, collective or public short-term car rentals rather than individual property, also considering ridesharing among coworkers, neighbors and family members (Steininger, 1994; Huwer, 2004). Nowadays, since the early 2000s, car sharing has been impacted majorly due to new internet technologies that enabled the entrance of individuals that do not take into consideration the responsible consumption necessary to collaborate with the urban mobility or reduce car ownership costs. Rather than sharing a car, ridesharing includes common origins, destinations and routes; differently, Uber is a ride sourcing service (Shaheen et al, 2016).
The term "gig economy" has been used by studies focused on the SE workers, although they are often applied to describe the same business phenomena that include companies such as Uber (Malin & Chandler, 2016). This interpretation points to research interests toward the providers, workers, suppliers and entrepreneurs of the SE. Therefore, the SE suits as a background for an empirical approach in aspects related to the individuals that are registered and serving others through these platforms. Only recently, the discussion of gig workers has been carried out (Graham, Hjorth, & Lehdonvirta, 2017). Not much is known about the dynamics of the gig work in relation to the workers, their moves in and out and uses amid the different forms of employment (Donovan, Bradley, & Shimabukuru, 2016).
Our study is a result of a master's dissertation and it seeks to answer the following research question:
RQ1. Why do individuals become Uber drivers and how is it to work as one?
The objective is to analyze why people have become providers in the SE and how it feels like to be a provider in the SE. Based on Cheng (2016), there is a theoretical gap that this study aims to fill, i.e., the providers' perspective on the SE, rather than their relationship with collaborative consumption. Also, based on this author, another existing theoretical gap is that little about SE has been studied in developing countries, which prompts practical implications to business practices and the impact of technology, city managers and policy makers on issues about SE workers, work relations, conditions and even unemployment.
In this first part of the paper, we argue that there is an important theoretical and practical gap related to the reasons that lead people to become SE workers and how it is to work in an SE; even though sharing, in this context, is not sharing at all (Eckhardt & Bardhi, 2015). In the second part, an SE concept is developed to further point out the differences that make sharing a unique type of economic distribution and it is now taken as a market for decentralized revenue production rather than a social production. In this conceptual background review, gig economy appears as synonym of SE with studies focused on SE labor. In the fourth part, we present information related to the methodological procedures of this qualitative research, which comprehends interviews conducted with Uber drivers and participant observation, as both driver and passenger, in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In the fifth part, we present the categories resulted from a content analysis in which the data collected is described. In the sixth and final part, we present the conclusion of the research and present some suggestions for future studies.
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Sharing economy, car sharing and gig economy
Sharing is a term hypothesized by anthropologists to be a distinct distribution mode in comparison to gifting, which is the main theoretical background in the field and is defined by the reciprocity that maintains individual relationships with one another (Bird-David, 1990). This idea is included in recent studies that further reinforces that the absence of reciprocity in sharing is one of the main variables that distinguishes it from the gift and also commodity exchanges, in which the last defines reciprocity by the payment for a good or service (Benkler, 2004; Belk, 2007).
Defined by the collaboratively internet-based projects, Wikipedia and Linux, freely consuming and providing, are closely related to what sharing means among people with close relationships (Lessig, 2008). When it comes to tangible, physical and personal goods, a new set of more instrumental processes is more common, such as in car sharing. Cars are shareable goods, their extra seats and idle time provide an excess capacity that can be understood as a resource, which is better allocated when shared (Benkler, 2004).
Specific car sharing literature adds a pro-environmental behavior, which can be seen in some characteristics of this sort of sharing, such as responsible mobility, modal rationality, alternative to car ownership and lower costs (Huwer, 2004). Similar variables were found to be of secondary influence for users of Uber and Lift (Shaheen et al, 2016). It is important to point out that car sharing literature has focused on niches and communities that have common culture and goals; differently, the number of Uber users has grown from about 0 to 460,000 by the end of 2015 in the USA (Hall & Krueger, 2016).
In recent years, many businesses have emerged under the sharing and collaboration banner. Different terms have also been presented and it has made more difficult to define where the original social production of the sharing ends and the market begins (Belk, 2014). Additionally, empirical evidence show that, in different SE enterprises, when the sharing mission is strongly adherent, trading activities are not robust, as well as when the trading volume is high, the sharing culture moves away (Schor et al, 2016). Therefore, according to some scholars, the presence of money, beyond cost division, jeopardizes collaboration; this way, sharing processes can turn into something much more instrumental, a commodity (Belk, 2014; Benkler, 2004; Lessig, 2008). Sharing parties become buyers and sellers in transactions with unknown individuals intermediated by digital platforms (Martin et al, 2015). As defined by Petrie (2016): "it's that an individual has a personal resource--either a service or tangible capital--that can be leveraged with a typically internet-enabled intermediary platform."
From this perspective, the mix between sharing as a social production and the market has become rather a part of a business phenomenon in which the collaborative cultural aspects are undermined by pricing and profit principles that can be found in digital platforms--currently, some billion dollars' worth intermediate (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012). Furthermore, empirical evidence show that different SE sites have more or less market ability, and some dominant practices in a macroeconomic market institution may also be transported by people into sharing sites, such as inequality, hierarchy and power (Schor et al, 2016). Authors such as Botsman and Rogers (2011), Gansky (2012) and Lamberton and Rose (2012) define SE based simply on the possibility of temporary access to goods in comparison to traditional property ownership, a rhetoric that embraces a society shift from property to access; that is, in this context, Uber users would no longer need to have cars of their own anymore (Schor & Attwood-Charles, 2017).
This second view, which accepts the mix among the different types of economic distribution, is more applicable to what Rifkin (2001) called as "the age of access." The work criticizes the role of the internet in the changing structure of capitalism from a property/materialistic society moving toward society network that is even more restrictive than the one before. He reviewed the work of Polanyi (1944/2013) to discuss about the commoditization of...
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