- Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, United Kingdom
- Received 30 July 2015, Revised 29 October 2015, Accepted 8 November 2015, Available online 19 November 2015
Highlights
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- The sharing economy is framed as both part of and beyond the capitalist economy.
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- Therefore it is framed as a performance: both constructive and deconstructive.
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- Sharing is held to perform through community, access and collaboration.
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- Performance shows the contingent, complex articulation of the sharing economy.
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- Affirmative critique can enact its promise of alternatives to business-as-usual.
Abstract
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.
Keywords
- Sharing economy;
- Performance;
- Community;
- Diverse economies;
- Work;
- Commons
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