Search

The sharing economy (SE) has drawn significant attention from several society stakeholders in the last five years. While business actors are interested in financial opportunities to meet consumer needs, new business models, academia and governmental organisations are concerned with potential unintended effects on society and the environment. Despite its notable global growth, there is still a lack of more solid ground in understanding its origins and respective mechanisms through which it has been evolving as a category. This research addresses the problematics of the origins and ascendency of the SE by examining the process by which it is arising as a new category, searching for conceptual clarification, and pinpointing the legitimacy granted by stakeholders. Our guiding research questions are: how the SE was formed and evolved as a category, and as a category, is the SE legitimate? Additionally, we attempt to identify the nature of the SE as a category. Making a historical analysis of the expression SE and its equivalents, this paper deepens the discussion about the SE&rsquo, s nature by providing evidence that it has predominantly been formed by emergence processes, comprising social movement, similarity clustering, and truce components, which render the SE a particular case of category formation and allow communication, entrepreneurship, regulation, and research about what it is. Moreover, the findings reveal a generalised legitimacy granted to the SE by a vast number of stakeholders, although still lacking the consolidation of socio-political legitimation. The SE&rsquo, s nature seems to fall into a metaphorical approach, notably, the notion of radial categories.

The Sharing Economy (SE) has been growing at an impressive rate across the globe (Cohen & Kietzmann, 2014) and emerging as a new and rapidly growing sector of the economy (Hira & Reilly, 2017), which has the effect of attracting the attention of the scientific community over the last few years. An increasing number of studies on the topic have been brought to light helping to document and analyse how SE manifests and evolves across various economic systems, thus, contributing to refine and recast existing management theory (Mair & Reischauer, 2017). Nonetheless, there still is a lack of common understanding of SE and its underlying mechanisms (Knote & Blohm, 2016). As an emergent category, SE has been contoured by being a mutant process, as it has been crafted by multiple and distinct temporal identity and legitimacy events, mechanisms and claims. Showing signs of being an on-going process of evolution, there is a constant need for further research on identifying new developments in the evolution of SE considering both identify claims (self-referential) and legitimacy (granted by stakeholders), which would offer additional comprehension about the SE phenomenon. In this research, we address these by studying what is the role of SE in establishing the identity of organizations belonging to the field, considering both identify claims (self-referential) and legitimacy (granted by stakeholders)? To answer this research question, we designed a research involving two components inspired on category creation studies (Durand & Paolella, 2013; Glynn & Navis, 2013; Navis & Glynn, 2010; Kennedy & Fiss, 2013; Kennedy et al., 2010; Lounsbury & Rao, 2004; and Wry et al., 2014): 1) four prototypical SE organizations were selected, each of them belonging to Schor’s (2014) four SE archetypes of activities. Respectively: (i) Airbnb – peer-to-peer, for-profit activity –, (ii) Zipcar – business-to-peer, for-profit activity –, (iii) TimeBanks – peer-to-peer, non-profit – and (iv) Make: makerspaces – business-to-peer, non-profit. The evolution of their identity claims were content analysed, using data from their publically available reports, as well as, other secondary data available on-line; and 2) considering the same set of SE organizations, legitimacy evolution was analysed considering how scientific community, investors, customers, media, other analysts and other interested audiences have been constructing category meaning to them, conferring the formation of SE categorical and organizational identities, and perceptions about the viability of their business models (Tripsas, 2009, as cited in Navis & Glynn, 2010). In short, it was analysed how audiences assess the viability of SE categories and organizations and can grant or withhold legitimacy to SE organizations (Zuckerman, 1999, as cited in Navis & Glynn, 2010). This paper presents a new layer on framing a detailed understanding of the SE field in its maturing dimension, thus, meeting Mair and Reischauer’s (2017) call for studying the SE, unpack and make sense of an inspiring and complex phenomenon and thereby to advance and refine existing theory. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion