Abstract
The green potential of the sharing economy to exploit underutilised or redundant resources has generated a considerable interest and expectations on the part of government institutions, investors and consumers. Alongside the emerging green logic, more established economic and social logics appear to be critical for growth of sharing platforms. Applying an institutional logics approach, this paper investigates how entrepreneurial teams in the sharing economy deal with this complexity of expectations of various constituents and institutions. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews with founders and executives of UK sharing platforms, we examine the strategies used by entrepreneurial teams to utilise and combine the green logic with other institutional logics present. The results demonstrate that sharing platforms are able to grow via utilising the green logic together with the economic and social logics in a flexible manner, applying complexity reducing and complexity absorbing strategies as well as temporal adjustments in the use of logics.
Highlights
There has been an increasing interest in the emerging sharing economy phenomenon and its green credentials (Cohen and Kietzmann 2014; Cohen and Munoz 2016; Martin 2016; Martin and Shaheen 2010; Schor 2014a, b)
The actual green credentials of the sharing economy are subject to an increasing debate, the green dimension emerges as a distinct institutional logic which can be enacted by sharing platforms in order to attract environmentally conscious platform users and to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of sustainabilityoriented local authorities and investors (see, for instance, sustainability reports by Cleantech (2014) and Aecom (2015) prepared for Airbnb)
Sharing economy research has primarily been driven by fragmented empirical pieces and media stories, with very little theorising to understand the nature of the phenomenon and complexities (Demailly and Novel 2014)
Summary
There has been an increasing interest in the emerging sharing economy phenomenon (associated with companies such as Airbnb, Uber, Blablacar, Peerby, among others) and its green credentials (Cohen and Kietzmann 2014; Cohen and Munoz 2016; Martin 2016; Martin and Shaheen 2010; Schor 2014a, b). Enabled by digital platform technologies, the sharing economy allows households, individuals, businesses and government and non-government organisations to engage in collaborative production, distribution and consumption of goods and services (Botsman and Rogers 2010; Stokes et al 2014) Can this potentially lead to an increase in employment, economic efficiency, broadened access to highly valuable assets and enhanced social relationships (Belk 2014; Hamari et al 2015; Schor and Fitzmaurice 2015; Thebault-Spieker et al 2015), it may give rise to more sustainable business and consumption models based on engagement with underutilised and redundant resources (Cohen and Kietzmann 2014; Demailly and Novel 2014; Hamari et al 2015). The literature, provides no or little insights into how these complexities are dealt with by sharing platforms and their entrepreneurial teams to succeed and grow
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