The “sharing” economy: labor, inequality, and social connection on for-profit platforms

Sociology Compass

Volumn 11, Issue 8, 2017, Pages

  Schor, Juliet B ^a   Attwood Charles, William ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85021814443     PISSN: None     EISSN: 17519020     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12493     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. Ahsan, K. (2015, June 19). Virtual labor organizing: “There's an app for that”. Working in These Times, Retrieved from http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18089/virtual_labor_organizing_theres_an_app_for_that.
2. Arnould, E. J., & Rose, A. S. (2015). Mutuality: Critique and substitute for Belk's “sharing”. Marketing Theory, 16(1), 75–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593115572669.
3. Attwood-Charles, W. L. (2017). Technology and control: Organizing through digital platforms. Unpublished paper, Boston College.
4. Baker, D. (2014, May 27). Don't buy the “sharing economy” hype: Airbnb and Uber are facilitating rip-offs. The Guardian, Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/27/airbnb-uber-taxes-regulation.
5. Balck, B., Cracau, D. (2015). Empirical analysis of customer motives in the shareconomy: a cross-sectoral comparison (Working Paper No. 2/2015). Retrieved from the Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg website: http://www.fww.ovgu.de/fww_media/femm/femm_2015/2015_02-EGOTEC-fffac3ecc88b12e16a19a7b0b7850c86.pdf
6. Belk, R. (2007). Why not share rather than own? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 611(1), 126–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716206298483.
7. Belk, R. (2010). Sharing. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(5), 715–734. https://doi.org/10.1086/612649.
8. Belk, R. (2014). You are what you can access: Sharing and collaborative consumption online. Journal of Business Research, 67(8), 1595–1600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.001.
9. Benkler, Y. (2004). Sharing nicely: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production. The Yale Law Journal, 114(2), 273–358.
10. Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
11. Bernhardt, A. (2014). Labor standards and the reorganization of work: Gaps in data and research. Retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hc6t3d5.pdf
12. Botsman, R., & Rogers, R. (2010). What's mine is yours: The rise of collaborative consumption. New York, NY: Harper.
13. Calvey, M. (2016, August 8). Venture capital investing weakens by several measures. Retrieved from http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2016/08/venture-capital-vc-investing-weakens-fenwick-west.html
14. Cannon, S., & Summers, L. (2014). How Uber and the sharing economy can win over regulators. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/10/how-uber-and-the-sharing-economy-can-win-over-regulators
15. Cansoy, M., & Schor, J. B. (2017). Who gets to share in the “sharing economy?”: Understanding the patterns of participation and exchange in Airbnb. Unpublished paper, Boston College.
16. Cramer, J., & Krueger, A. B. (2015). Disruptive change in the taxi business: The case of Uber (NBER Working Paper No. 22083). Retrieved from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Disruptive-Change-in-the-Taxi-Business-the-Case-of-Cramer-Krueger/766fee06bb8bdde37820eb487dc3c1bbb1b21637/pdf
17. Davies, C. (2016, May 30). Iceland plans Airbnb restrictions amid tourism explosion. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/30/iceland-plans-airbnb-restrictions-amid-tourism-explosion
18. Dubal, V. (2017). Wage slave or entrepreneur? Contesting the dualism of legal worker identities. California Law Review, 105, 65–126.
19. Dubois, E., Schor, J., & Carfagna, L. (2014). New cultures of connection in a Boston time bank. In J. Schor (Ed.), Sustainable lifestyles and the quest for plentitude: Case studies of the new economy (pp. 95–124). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
20. Edelman, B. G., & Geradin, D. (2015). Efficiencies and regulatory shortcuts: How should we regulate companies like Airbnb and Uber? (Working Paper No. 16-026). Harvard Business School. Retrieved from http://www.benedelman.org/publications/efficiencies-and-shortcuts-2015-11-24.pdf
21. Edelman, B., & Luca, M. (2014). Digital discrimination: The case of Airbnb.com. Harvard Business School Working Paper (14-054). Retrieved July 11, 2014 from http://www.west-info.eu/files/airbnb_research.pdf
22. Edelman, B., Luca, M., & Svirsky, D. (2017). Racial discrimination in the sharing economy: Evidence from a field experiment. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 9(2):1–22.
23. Fitzmaurice, C., Ladegaard, I., Attwood-Charles, W., Carfagna, L. B., Schor, J. B., & Wengronowitz, R. (2016). Domesticating the market: Moral exchange and the sharing economy. Unpublished paper, Boston College.
24. Fitzsimmons, Emma G., & Hu, Winnie. (2017, March 6). The downside of ride-hailing: More New York city gridlock. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/nyregion/uber-ride-hailing-new-york-transportation.html?_r=0
25. Folbre, N. (2001). The invisible heart: Economics and family values. New York, NY: New Press.
26. Fraiberger, S. P., & Sundararajan, A. (2015). Peer-to-Peer Rental Markets in the Sharing Economy. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Retrieved March 13, 2016 from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2574337
27. Frenken, K., & Schor, J. (2017). Putting the sharing economy into perspective. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 23, 3–10.
28. Frenken, K., Meelen, T., Arets, M., & van de Glind, P. (2015). Smarter Regulation for the Sharing Economy. The Guardian, May 20. Retrieved April 17, 2017 from https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/may/20/smarter-regulation-for-the-sharing-economy
29. Gawer, A. (2014). Bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms: Toward an integrative framework. Research Policy, 43(7), 1239–1249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2014.03.006.
30. Ge, Y., Knittel, C. R., MacKenzie, D., & Zoepf, S. (2016). Racial and gender discrimination in transportation network companies (NBER Working Paper No. 22776).
31. Geiger, A., & Germelmann, C. C. (2015). “Thank me for hosting”: The role of reciprocity in sharing. NA—Advances in Consumer Research, 43, 534–535. Retrieved from http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/1019382/volumes/v43/NA-43.
32. Gershman, J. (2016, April 1). Uber antitrust lawsuit clears court hurdle in New York. Retrieved from http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2016/04/01/uber-antitrust-lawsuit-clears-court-hurdle-in-new-york/
33. Glusac, E. (2016, June 21). As Airbnb grows, so do claims of discrimination. The New York Times, Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/travel/airbnb-discrimination-lawsuit.html.
34. Hacker, J. S. (2008). The great risk shift: The new economic insecurity and the decline of the American dream (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
35. Hall, J. V., & Krueger, A. B. (2015). An analysis of the labor market for Uber's driver-partners in the United States (Working Paper, 587). Princeton University Industrial Relations Section. Retrieved from https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1507970/uberstudy.pdf
36. Hill, S. (2015). Raw deal: How the “Uber economy” and runaway capitalism are Screwing American workers. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.
37. Horton, J. J., & Zeckhauser, R. J. (2016). Owning, using and renting: Some simple economics of the “sharing economy” (NBER Working Paper No. 22029). Retrieved from the National Bureau of Economic Research website: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22029
38. Ikkala, T., & Lampinen, A. (2015). Monetizing network hospitality: Hospitality and sociability in the context of Airbnb. CSCW'15 proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 1033–1044). New York, NY: ACM. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675274
39. Interian, J. (2016). Up in the air: Harmonizing the sharing economy through Airbnb regulations. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 39, 129.
40. Irwin, N. (2016, March 31). With “gigs” instead of jobs, workers bear new burdens. The New York Times, Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/upshot/contractors-and-temps-accounted-for-all-of-the-growth-in-employment-in-the-last-decade.html
41. John, N. A. (2013). The social logics of sharing. The Communication Review, 16(3), 113–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2013.807119.
42. John, N. A. (2016). The age of sharing. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
43. Kalamar, A. (2013). Sharewashing Is the New Greenwashing. OpEdNews. Retrieved from http://www.opednews.com/articles/Sharewashing-is-the-New-Gr-by-Anthony-Kalamar-130513-834.html
44. Kalleberg, A. L. (2013). Good jobs, bad jobs: The rise of polarized and precarious employment systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s (1st paperback ed.). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
45. Katz, L. F., & Krueger, A. B. (2016). The rise and nature of alternative work arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015. Retrieved from http://krueger.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/akrueger/files/katz_krueger_cws_-_march_29_20165.pdf
46. Kenney, M., & Zysman, J. (2015). Choosing a future in the platform economy: The implications and consequences of digital platforms. In Kauffman Foundation New Entrepreneurial Growth Conference (pp. 156–160). Retrieved April 15, 2017 from http://www.brie.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/PlatformEconomy2DistributeJune21.pdf.
47. Kenney, M., & Zysman, J. (2016). The rise of the platform economy. Issues in Science and Technology, 32(3), 61–69.
48. Ladegaard, I. (2017). Hosting the comfortably exotic: Cosmopolitan aspirations in the sharing economy. The Sociological Review, in press.
49. Ladegaard, I., Ravenelle, A., & Schor, J. B. (2017). Provider Vulnerability in the Sharing Economy. Unpublished paper. Boston College.
50. Lampinen, A., & Cheshire, C. (2016). Hosting via Airbnb: Motivations and financial assurances in monetized network hospitality. CHI'16 proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. New York, NY: ACM. Retrieved from http://www.mobilelifecentre.org/sites/default/files/Airbnb%20Submitted%20Camera.pdf
51. Laouenan, M., & Rathelot, R. (2016). Ethnic discrimination on an online marketplace of vacation rentals. Unpublished paper. CNRS Paris.
52. Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
53. Lobo, S. (2014, March 9). S.P.O.N.—Die Mensch-Maschine: Auf dem Weg in die Dumpinghölle. Retrieved from Spiegel Online website: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/sascha-lobo-sharing-economy-wie-bei-uber-ist-plattform-kapitalismus-a-989584.html
54. McLaren, D., & Agyeman, J. (2015). Sharing cities: A case for truly smart and sustainable cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
55. Möhlmann, M. (2015). Collaborative consumption: Determinants of satisfaction and the likelihood of using a sharing economy option again. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 14(3), 193–207. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.1512.
56. Monroy-Hernández, A. (2014). Commentary on debating the sharing economy. Great Transition Initiative. Retrieved May 31, 2017 from http://www.greattransition.org/commentary/andres-monroy-hernandez-debating-the-sharing-economy-juliet-schor.
57. O'Donovan, C., & Singer-Vine, J. (2016, June 22). How much Uber drivers actually make per hour. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/internal-uber-driver-pay-numbers
58. Oliver, M., & Shapiro, T. (2006). Black wealth/White wealth: A new perspective on racial inequality (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
59. Parigi, P., & State, B. (2014). Disenchanting the world: The impact of technology on relationships. Social Informatics, 8851, 166–182.
60. Parigi, P., State, B., Dakhlallah, D., Corten, R., & Cook, K. (2013). A community of strangers: The dis-embedding of social ties. PLoS ONE, 8(7), e67388. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0067388.
61. Pasquale, F. A. (2013). Paradoxes of Digital Antitrust. Retrieved August 8, 2016 from https://works.bepress.com/frank_pasquale/35/download/.
62. Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
63. Pasquale, F. (2016). Two narratives of platform capitalism. Yale Law and Policy Review, 35, 309–319. Retrieved from http://ylpr.yale.edu/sites/default/files/YLPR/pasquale.final_.2.pdf.
64. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
65. Quattrone, G., Proserpio, D., Quercia, D., Capra, L., & Musolesi, M. (2016). Who benefits from the “sharing” economy of Airbnb? In Proceedings of the 25th international conference on world wide web (pp. 1385–1394). Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. https://doi.org/10.1145/2872427.2874815.
66. Ravenelle, A. J. (2016a). Hustle: The lived experience of workers in the sharing economy (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY.
67. Ravenelle, A. J. (2016b). Our community: Airbnb, circuits of commerce and the distinction-reducing paradox of money. Unpublished Paper.
68. Ravenelle, A. J. (2016c). Belong anywhere? How Airbnb is dismantling generations of civil rights in the name of progress.
69. Ravenelle, A. (2017). Sharing economy workers: Selling, not sharing. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsw043
70. Reich, R. B. (2015). The Share-the-Scraps Economy. Robert Reich. Retrieved March 13, 2016 from http://robertreich.org/post/109894095095.
71. Richardson, L. (2015). Performing the sharing economy. Geoforum, 67, 121–129.
72. Rosenblat, A., & Stark, L. (2015). Algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: A case study of Uber's drivers. International Journal of Communication, 10, 37 Retrieved from the SSRN website: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2686227.
73. Santana, J., & Parigi, P. (2015). Risk aversion and engagement in the sharing economy. Games, 6, 560–573.
74. Scheiber, N. (2017, April 2). How Uber uses psychological tricks to push its drivers' buttons. The New York Times, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/02/technology/uber-drivers-psychological-tricks.html.
75. Scholz, T. (Ed) (2013). Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory. New York, NY: Routledge.
76. Scholz, T. (2014, December 5). Platform cooperativism vs. the sharing economy. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@trebors/platform-cooperativism-vs-the-sharing-economy-2ea737f1b5ad
77. Scholz, T. (2016). Uberworked and underpaid: How workers are disrupting the digital economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
78. Schor, J. B. 2014. Debating the Sharing Economy. Tellus Institute. Retrieved September 17, 2015 from http://www.greattransition.org/publication/debating-the-sharing-economy
79. Schor, J. B. (2015a). Homo varians: Diverse motives and economic behavior in the sharing economy. Unpublished paper. Boston College.
80. Schor, J. B. (2015b). The sharing economy: Reports from stage one. Retrieved from http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/sociology/pdf/TheSharingEconomy.pdf
81. Schor, J. B. (2017). Does the sharing economy increase inequality within the eighty percent? Findings from a qualitative study of platform providers. Cambridge Journal of Regions. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsw047
82. Schor, J. B., Attwood-Charles, W., Cansoy, M., Ladegaard, I., & Wengronowitz, R. (2017). Dependence and precarity in the sharing economy. Unpublished paper, Boston College.
83. Schor, J., & Fitzmaurice, C. (2015). Collaborating and connecting: The emergence of the sharing economy. In J. B. Schor & C. Thompson (Eds.), Handbook of research on sustainable consumption (pp. 410–425). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
84. Schor, J. B., Fitzmaurice, C., Attwood-Charles, W., Carfagna, L. B., & Dubois Poteat, E. (2016). Paradoxes of openness and distinction in the sharing economy. Poetics, 54, 66–81.
85. Slee, T. (2015). What's yours is mine: Against the sharing economy. New York, NY: OR Books.
86. Smith, A. (2016, May 19). Shared, collaborative and on demand: The new digital economy. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/05/19/the-new-digital-economy/
87. Sperling, G. (2015). How Airbnb combats middle class income stagnation. Retrieved from https://airbnb.box.com/shared/static/jrry0if4cgjrnvw1ykrpmw8ugivrx2mx.pdf
88. Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. London, UK: Bloomsbury.
89. Stene, A. K., & Holte, H. F. (2015). A new lease on life: Why do Norwegian consumers participate in collaborative consumption? A case study of Airbnb and Bilkollektivet. Retrieved from http://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/276161
90. Sundararajan, A. (2016). The sharing economy: The end of employment and the rise of crowd-based capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
91. Telles, R. J. (2016). Digital matching firms: A new definition in the “sharing economy” space (Economics and Statistics Administration No. 01-16). Office of the Chief Economist, U.S. Department of Commerce.
92. Thebault-Spieker, J., Terveen, L. G., & Hecht, B. (2015). Avoiding the South Side and the suburbs: The geography of mobile crowdsourcing markets (pp. 265–275). New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675278.
93. Tomassetti, J. (2016). From hierarchies to markets: FedEx drivers and the work contract as institutional marker. Lewis & Clark Law Review, 19(4), Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2515818.
94. Turkle, S. (2012). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York, NY: Basic Books.
95. Turner, F. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
96. Vallas, S., & Prener, C. (2012). Dualism, job polarization, and the social construction of precarious work. Work and Occupations, 39(4), 331–353. https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888412456027.
97. Wang, S. (2016, February 1). Uber drivers strike to protest fare cuts in New York City. Bloomberg News, Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-01/uber-drivers-plan-strike-to-protest-fare-cuts-in-new-york-city.
98. Wong, J. C. (2016, July 22). Most wanted: San Francisco flyers name and shame Airbnb hosts. The Guardian, Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/22/airbnb-san-francisco-wanted-posters-chinatown.
99. Zelizer, V. A. R. (1997). The social meaning of money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
100. Zelizer, V. A. R. (2005). The purchase of intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
101. Zervas, G., Proserpio, D., & Byers, J. (2014). The rise of the sharing economy: Estimating the impact of airbnb on the hotel industry. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Retrieved January 6, 2015 from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2366898.