Learning to share: Pedagogy, open learning, and the sharing economy

Abstract

The sharing economy is fertile sociological ground for studying important themes like labor, exchange, consumption, and inequality, as well as larger political-economic trends that are reflective of this post-recession era. The multifaceted research agenda of the sharing economy can provide lessons around many themes relevant to sociologists, but what does the sharing economy teach to those who participate in it? What is learned from the sharing economy and how do participants learn it? In this article, the author explores the pedagogic elements of one case study within the sharing economy: open learning. Drawing from 51 interviews with 34 participants and roughly 300 hours of participant observation, the study uses Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse to ask how open learners learn to share. The author argues that an ethos of communalism and cooperativism dominated moral discourse for learners and regulated social order. Entrepreneurialism was learned through a flexible sociality, where participants contributed to each other’s learning as a means of validating and legitimizing that learning. The need to contribute or give back was taken for granted by participants, who felt compelled to give their own expertise or labor to the commons after taking something from it. This study depicts a tension between a neoliberal entrepreneurial frame and a communalist, cooperativist frame that is also present within the larger sharing economy. The author suggests that a similar pedagogic approach that asks how participants learn to share could be developed in the larger sharing economy in order to better understand learning and economic relations as two sides of the same coin in contemporary capitalism.