{"id":528,"date":"2016-09-24T12:14:43","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T12:14:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/?p=528"},"modified":"2016-09-26T14:12:16","modified_gmt":"2016-09-26T14:12:16","slug":"international-workshop-sharing-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/general-interest\/2016\/09\/international-workshop-sharing-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"International Workshop on the Sharing Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"3rd<\/a>
3rd International Sharing Economy Workshop<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the new academic year on its way I was lucky to fit in another conference last week. It was the 3rd International Workshop on the Sharing Economy, hosted by the University of Southampton at the Winchester Campus.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago The Economist announced on its cover the coming of Uberworld. Uber, the taxi service app is now worth $60 billion and is the world’s most valuable start-up. The Uber network transforms the idea of transport as a service and the company is well placed to take advantage of a future world of transport based on autonomous vehicles.<\/p>\n

Does this mean the sharing economy has now become a successful way to do business? The conference was an opportunity to find out.<\/p>\n

From a Southampton perspective, the workshop was a collaborative effort among Southampton Business School, the Department of Geography and Environment, and the Winchester School of Art. This reflects the research strengths Southampton has in the areas of economic geography and social entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n

Around a hundred international delegates came from academic fields including design, economics, geography and entrepreneurship. This is the kind of interdisciplinary gathering I tend to enjoy.<\/p>\n

Getting around<\/p>\n

Travel and accommodation should not have been a problem for me given that the venue was only a few miles from my university office. But I was in the hands of Southern Rail to get to work and so was late for the Day 1 keynote talk. As it turned out I didn’t miss anything because the keynote speaker, the author Rachel Botsman, was stuck in traffic … in Sydney. After some waiting and troubleshooting Rachel appeared on the large screen and her virtual keynote was under way. It was a thoughtful and interactive session about the sharing economy as a movement and as a research topic. The travel and accommodation theme continued through Rachel’s talk, and indeed the conference as a whole, with Uber and Airbnb (a home sharing platform) being the go-to examples.<\/p>\n

I have been intrigued by alternative forms of economic exchange and resource use for many years and was, like many, motivated by the phenomenon of the ‘sharing economy’ when it emerged a decade ago. As with related debates about networks and digital platforms, such as Wikinomics1, I closely followed the early ideas in this area and read a copy of Rachel’s 2011 co-authored book ‘What’s Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is changing the way we live’2.<\/p>\n

A friendly fad?<\/p>\n

Around 2010 I eagerly signed up to various platforms including the free accommodation platform Couchsurfing. I also created a network for sharing DVDs with family and friends called ShareFilm, which lasted a few years. My brother has a huge movie collection in his home as a result, although not quite as big as LoveFilm or NetFlix!<\/p>\n

In 2012 my wife and I moved to Brighton and Hove on the south coast of the UK, an alternative city: a kind of gentrified bohemia. We were amazed by the sudden appearance of Web-based sharing initiatives in the area. There was a platform for sharing DIY tools, a platform for sharing land for food growing, and a cooking platform, where anyone could set up a takeaway service from their kitchen. Having a passion for food and cooking we signed up to the last on this list \u2013 created our own menu and planned (on the back of an envelope) the logistics of cooking and delivering hot food to a demanding Brighton population. My wife was to be the Head Chef and I was to be the delivery driver on my bicycle (and Sous Chef when allowed in the kitchen).<\/p>\n

Needless to say, it didn’t last. In fact we never actually cooked a meal for a paying customer \u2013largely because the platform was stifled by local authority health and safety regulation.<\/p>\n

After a few years the sharing economy started to look to me like a digital fairy tale – a middle class Leftist dream. It seemed economically unviable, unscalable, and unsustainable. I had not surfed on any couches or eaten at any peer-to-peer restaurants. I had not borrowed a neighbour’s lawnmower for the afternoon, or grown strawberries in anyone else’s garden. This seemed to be the end of the idea.<\/p>\n

A research agenda<\/p>\n

The concept had received attention by the world\u2019s media and it did became a hot Web trend for a few years, but by 2013 there was a backlash in the business and financial press, with articles pronouncing “The Sharing Economy Isn’t About Trust, It’s About Desperation”, The FT said “The \u2018sharing economy\u2019 undermines worker\u2019s rights”, and by 2015 the Harvard Business Review declared “The sharing economy isn’t about sharing at all”3. Meanwhile, Uber and Airbnb were growing exponentially. They built an international following, challenged local business models, and broke through government regulation.<\/p>\n

For the past few years I have not given the sharing economy much thought. But when I travelled to Canada earlier this year for a conference with Zak and Tom Rowledge from the Co-design group we used Uber to get around all week. I had no idea what was going on, but Zak would get his phone out and a few minutes later an unmarked taxi driver would show up. They came in all shapes and sizes. Most got us to our destination swiftly and with a similar quality of service to a regular taxi company, but one driver, an old British man with a hearing aid, did get lost for 15 minutes and tried to cross a five lane carriage way. He got us there eventually. There were some friendly conversations with the Uber drivers, but questions like “where are you guys from?” and “where are you heading today?” moved into darker places revealing uncomfortable working lives in the Uber economy: “Oh, I used to live in the UK years ago … back then we had jobs”.<\/p>\n

Since 2010, university researchers and think tanks have turned their attention to the sharing economy and have begun to investigate the topic in the slow but diligent way they know best. There has been something of a flurry of over 500 academic articles on the topic in the past 2 years alone, and this trend will keep on growing as academic communities, like the International Workshop, build research capacity.<\/p>\n

What does the research tell us?<\/p>\n

There were two parallels streams during the conference. The sessions involved both student and staff presentations. There were also some pre-recorded video presentations, with varied quality. The applied sessions included \u2018Dissecting Airbnb\u2019, \u2018Why car-share? Why car-ride?\u2019, \u2018Shareable Cities\u2019, and \u2018Regulation and policy development\u2019. There were also more theoretical sessions such as \u2018Trust and reciprocity\u2019, \u2018Institutional drivers and contexts\u2019, and \u2018social value perspectives\u2019.<\/p>\n

So what did I learn?<\/p>\n

The concept has grown with truly international scale and scope. There are now \u2018sharing\u2019 Web apps on every continent. Every major developed city in the world has competing platforms for transportation, accommodation and eating. It is safe to say that the sharing economy is not a passing fad but is here to stay in some form.<\/p>\n

Yet the sharing economy is still at an immature stage of experimentation. Most platforms are local social experiments sustained by the efforts of small groups of social entrepreneurs. With my appetite for food I attended a presentation about evidence from an app in the Netherlands called Shareyourmeal4. This was a bit like the initiative I attempted to join in Brighton a few years ago, but the customers in the Dutch case collect the meals from the home of the cook. The service has successfully facilitated over one hundred thousand meals in a few years.<\/p>\n

The geographical research has attempted to shed light on the local contexts of sharing experiences, using ethnographic or textual data. A paper on the evolution of Airbnb tracked the rhetoric and reality of cultural experiences in major cities. Airbnb now brands itself with the social ethos of \u2018people, places, love and community\u2019. The move to provide personalised \u2018live like a local\u2019 cultural experiences was contrasted with more established commercial city tours. Often in reality there were few organizational differences between the two types of offerings.<\/p>\n

A paper presentation on the use of Airbnb in Jamaica evoked a sense of the cultural ambiguity of emotional labour. Can a friendly local resident ever offer anything more to a stranger than a professional service? When does a service encounter become a fuller social connection; or even a form of friendship? The empirical studies on the emerging uses of sharing platforms are highly contextualised and will serve to gradually fill out the social and cultural variations of Web-mediated interactions.<\/p>\n

In the Day 1 keynote someone asked if the term \u2018sharing\u2019 has any meaning in the context of monetised transactions, such as on Uber and Airbnb. Rachel reflected that many of the distributed networks are really just online marketplaces, with little difference to eBay or Amazon marketplace, and are more about economic efficiency than sharing. Although the use of privately owned assets does make the transaction qualitatively different if it is also used for personal use (e.g. a car used by the family and also for paying customers).<\/p>\n

The deeper meaning of \u2018sharing\u2019 is connected to the difficult concept of \u2018trust\u2019. This came up in every session I sat in. Many researchers are trying to find rigorous ways of measuring trust but there is so far little agreement on the best way to do this. A provocative perspective on trust here is that people do not naturally trust other people very easily: it is much easier to trust a corporation offering hotel rooms than a family with a spare room. In a climate where we are frequently told that few people trust large corporations and business leaders this simple observation is a reminder of just how much people do trust business organizations.<\/p>\n

The sharing economy is still in adolescence. The technology enabling reliable Web interaction and mobile apps is barely a decade old. With economic growth depending on service industries, new forms of personalised social exchange will continue to evolve on the Web. The Internet of Things will enable private assets to be used in fundamentally different ways, opening up decentralised networks of resource capacity.<\/p>\n

The really difficult part is the sharing. Building trust in others, particularly those from other geographies and cultures, does not come naturally. Online networks may open up endless possibilities for interaction and exchange, but friendship is fundamentally inefficient. It takes time, energy and commitment to form social connections. It remains to be seen whether the sharing economy will ever really be about sharing.<\/p>\n

Recent things in the media about the sharing economy
\nUber\u2019s self-driving cars: http:\/\/video.ft.com\/5123820323001\/Uber-goes-driverless\/Companies
\nAirbnb: Dream or Nightmare? Channel 4: https:\/\/learningonscreen.ac.uk\/ondemand\/index.php\/prog\/0D7A0EA4
\nStanding Up to the Sharing Economy , 11:00 09\/09\/2016, BBC Radio 4, 30 mins. https:\/\/learningonscreen.ac.uk\/ondemand\/index.php\/prog\/0D574424 (Accessed 22 Sep 2016)<\/p>\n

References:
\n1. https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Wikinomics-Mass-Collaboration-Changes-Everything\/dp\/184354637X\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474301268&sr=8-1&keywords=wikinomics
\n2. https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Whats-Mine-Yours-Collaborative-Consumption\/dp\/0007395914\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474301109&sr=8-1&keywords=what+mine+is+yours
\n3. https:\/\/hbr.org\/2015\/01\/the-sharing-economy-isnt-about-sharing-at-all
\n4. https:\/\/www.shareyourmeal.net\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the new academic year on its way I was lucky to fit in another conference last week. It was the 3rd International Workshop on the Sharing Economy, hosted by the University of Southampton at the Winchester Campus. A few weeks ago The Economist announced on its cover the coming of Uberworld. Uber, the taxi service app is now worth …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75786,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1030549,1030531],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-sacaca-project","column","threecol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75786"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":534,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions\/534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}