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This chapter aims to present and analyse the phenomenon of ‘sharing economy’ or ‘collaborative consumption’ in relation to tourism entrepreneurship. It presents and highlights the factors contributing to the growth of sharing economy and its business models, as well as strategically analyse related opportunities, challenges, concerns and threats in the field of tourism entrepreneurship.

Literature review was conducted on conceptual issues and main aspects of sharing economy, combined with examples and case studies within the tourism business environment.

This chapter highlights the fact that tourism businesses face new developments, trends and changes in tourist consumer behaviour and travel technology. It shows that sharing economy is on the rise, already affecting all segments of tourism industry, offering significant opportunities, as well as challenges and threats.

This chapter is explorative in nature because the discussed is based on a literature review.

The sharing economy/collaborative consumption is transforming the way people access goods and services changing all elements of trip planning. This is of great significance to the tourism industry, considering the business opportunities in all segments of related businesses. It is suggested that tourism entrepreneurs – existing, new and prospective – should elaborate the suitable strategies to address the new challenges.

It analyses main issues and aspects of the sharing economy within the tourism context. This analysis contributes to an improved knowledge and understanding that are very useful to all existing and prospective tourism providers.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework that provides insights into major environmental and organizational forces underlying greater levels of organizational responsiveness to the environmental sustainability imperative by a growing number of firms, worldwide.

The paper is conceptual in its focus, and the proposed framework builds on extant literature from multiple literature streams.

Societal progress toward environmental sustainability is a shared responsibility of consumers, corporations, and the government at various levels. A potential avenue for societal progress toward environmental sustainability is fostering a macroenvironment that is conducive to the elimination of consumption certain products, reduction in consumption certain other products, and redirection of consumption of still other products from ecologically more harmful to ecologically less harmful substitute products (and relatedly, demand elimination, demand reduction, and demand redirection).

An implication for corporate sustainability responsibility is that firms while planning and formulating strategies for increasing their market footprint must also concurrently plan and formulate strategies for decreasing their environmental footprint. An implication for government sustainability responsibility is that even under conditions of high levels of commitment by a large and growing number of firms and consumers to engage in environmentally sustainable behaviors, in the absence of supporting infrastructure for engaging in such behavior, they may find it necessary to engage in environmentally unsustainable behaviors.

Issues relating to environmental sustainability have been the focus of a large body of recent research in a number of academic disciplines including marketing. A cursory examination of numerous articles published in scholarly journals on issues pertaining to environmental sustainability, and in the business press pertaining to the myriad environmental sustainability initiatives of firms worldwide is indicative of its growing importance.

The ‘sharing economy’ involves the giving and taking of goods, services, your room, my car, our food recipes and alternative forms of money to create a new economic imperative. Its open-sourced character is the creation of producers, users, consumers and, crucially, citizens, who consciously or unwittingly are carving out a new economy with a collaborative, social impetus. Driven, on the one hand, by technology that refuses to be constrained in the hands of the few, and, on the other, by the fracturing of our economies and societies by inequality (ecological, demographic, the movement of people across borders), the giving-and-taking phenomenon is lubricated by new sources of funding and philanthropy. The sharing economy opens up possibilities for the further consolidation of wealth either in the coffers of a privileged minority or a reversal of wealth creation and the inculcation of entrepreneurship as the right and responsibility of citizens through the sharing of ideas, technologies and values, locally and globally in varied ‘commons’. This chapter offers an analysis of the phenomenon of giving and taking in an open-sourced environment and proposes ideas for a prospective citizen entrepreneurship to open up spaces for collaborative new ventures.

This chapter explores how classic and institutional entrepreneurs in the sharing economy (SE) frame and make sense of the emergent, plural, and contested SE concept. The authors address this question through an investigation of an attempt to institutionalize the SE as a separate field in France, through data collected among SE entrepreneurs gravitating around OuiShare, a leading institutional entrepreneur for the SE. To analyze the plurality of discursive framings within the SE field, we explored how classic entrepreneurs affiliated with the SE and institutional entrepreneurs made sense of the concept and its related practices by referring to different theories and narratives. The results reveal that classic entrepreneurs used and combined four distinct theoretical currents (access economy, commons, gift, and libertarianism) to frame their projects. This framing diversity was further reinforced at the meso level by specific forms of institutional entrepreneurship which reflected and actively built on such framing diversity. However, over time, such heterogeneity negatively affects the internal coherence of the field. Based on these results, the authors discuss the impact of enduring framing diversity on the SE organizational field emergence and development.

Contrary to what its title might suggest, this chapter does not develop an alternative vision of finance. On the basis of the financial world as it currently operates, we propose to identify the paradoxes and the likely evolution of a banking and financial system evolving. Based on the facts, this chapter seeks to extend the discussions initiated in the last chapter, entitled “Socially responsible banks?” of our book “The management of the bank,” published by Vuibert editions. The frantic pace of innovation and the requirements of regulators encourage banks to review their organization and their governance. This chapter attempts to position the bank between two paradoxes: on one side, the crises have not made more responsible banks. The facts remain: rates and currency manipulation, embezzlement rules on bonuses, even if some are still under financial assistance of the United States. On the other hand, the “finance otherwise” innovates, disturbs, and upsets. Creative players such as collaborative funding or virtual currencies are not really threatening to the big banks. But in the past, marked by their personnel costs and infrastructure cannot meet the agility of these new entrants “crowdfunding,” and other online payment methods have backed the Web. These innovations really threaten banks that do not lack the resources to adapt. And if tomorrow, the banks no longer existed? Behavior changes and already a growing number of clients save, borrow, and lend the use of means of payment to settle their online purchases without using the services of traditional financial institutions! A certainty, “finance otherwise,” will play a stimulatory role. The speed and magnitude of change is such that it becomes necessary for banks and financial institutions to adapt to these new technologies to increase or simply maintain their business. Based on the facts, the chapter explores and analyzes the developments that may become sustainable for a banking system reluctant to lose the monopoly of the distribution of credit and means of payment. The “end of the banks,” is a “provocative” subject but insufficiently addressed in the economic literature.