The Sharing Economy and Social Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Development

Abstract

In the present work, the authors set out to identify common ground between social entrepreneurship and the sharing economy, justify the application of these models for the sustainable development of society, as well as conduct a bibliographic study into these concepts to identify areas of overlap between them. For a more in-depth analysis, we studied 20 social entrepreneurs and 20 English versions of websites of organizations that implement the sharing economy model. Based on semantic data analysis and latent Dirichlet allocation, the texts under examination were grouped into 5 topics according to frequency of occurrence of keywords using the Python programming language. In order to trace a connection between these topics and sustainable development, we selected words that can serve as markers of environmental, social and economic aspects of the activities of these organizations. Each identified topic has appeared to have an aspect of digitalization. The study revealed that the application of the sharing economy model by social entrepreneurs and companies contributes to the sustainable development of society. The obtained results can be used in elaboration of approaches to provide the sustainable development of society.