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We are currently witnessing a new wave of the digital economy. A prime example is the sharing economy where an organization operates a platform for its online community, the sum of individuals who interact to exchange goods and services. The sharing economy blurs several boundaries of economic life – a fact that extant theory on platform organizing has yet paid little attention. We argue to consider two aspects of the sharing economy and revisit related theory to address this lacuna. First, we revive the concept of hybrid community to denote a variant of an online community that mirrors the boundary-blurring nature of the sharing economy. In a hybrid community, individuals interact both online and offline (instead of only online) and consume as well as produce. Second, we revisit the range of strategic responses suggested by extant literature to minimize the dependence of a platform organization on its hybrid community and show that the sharing economy requires management research to adapt and potentially recast existing claims.

Independent actors operating through peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms co-create service experiences, such as shared car-rides or home-stays. Emotional labor among both parties, manifested in the mutual enactment of socially desirable behavior, is essential in ensuring that these experiences are successful. However, little is known about emotional labor practices and about how sharing economy platforms enforce emotional labor practices among independent actors, such as guests, hosts, drivers, or passengers. To address this research gap, we follow a mixed methods approach. We combine survey research among Airbnb and Uber users with content analysis of seven leading sharing economy platforms. The findings show that (1) users perform emotional labor despite not seeing is as necessarily desirable and (2) platforms actively encourage the performance of emotional labor practices even in the absence of direct formal control. Emotional labor practices are encouraged through (hard) design features such as mutual ratings, reward systems, and gamification, as well as through more subtle (soft) normative framing of desirable practices via platform and app guidelines, tips, community sites, or blogs. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of the limitations of peer-to-peer sharing platforms, where control over the service experience and quality can only be enforced indirectly.

The sharing economy is a collection of economic and social activities where participants of the community share properties, resources, time and skills across online platforms. In this chapter, we start by identifying all the stakeholders and their characteristics within such an ecosystem. We then categorise factors leading to success in the sharing economies where the existence of these platforms has disrupted traditional businesses. To do so, demographic information about the community participants, specifications of the business models, enablers of the ecosystem, growth drivers and hindrance factors are explored in detail. From there on, we examine whether such success factors are applicable in the Turkish business environment where Internet retailing is in its infant stages, trust among people is quite low and economic welfare is lower than that of more developed economies. Finally, an assessment of the sharing economy landscape in Turkey is provided at the end of the chapter.

To outline the future of the sharing economy in Turkey, success indicators in the Turkish market are compared and contrasted with those of the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil. A quick analysis reveals that despite its huge potential, Turkey still has not reached its full capacity in Internet usage, online or mobile retailing. That said, notwithstanding the low levels of trust among people, Turkey has a great potential of sharer base, given the demographic structure of its citizens. Recommendations for policy makers, incumbent firms, the sharing economy startups and marketers are provided in the chapter.

This chapter focuses on the largely unexplored within- and cross-category spillovers between category kings and commoners within the field of the sharing economy. Going beyond the reputational spill-overs that are the main focus of extant literature, the authors also consider spill-overs in awareness, regulation, and customer usage between category kings and commoners, providing a holistic view of what it means to be a commoner in the same or adjacent category as a king. On the basis of a mixed-method study based on semi-structured interviews with UK sharing platforms and a consumer survey, the authors show that category commoners are affected by kings differently depending whether they are in the exact same sub-category or in an adjacent one within the same larger category. This chapter expands extant work on within and cross-category dynamics by taking the less popular perspective of the less visible category members. Studying these dynamics in the setting of the sharing economy also contributes to the authors’ knowledge of what enables/hinders the growth of a new field as a whole. Finally, the findings have important policy implications.

Critics increasingly highlight the dark sides of the sharing economy resulting from the insufficient regulation of competition, labor, or taxes in its for-profit sector. In this chapter, the authors argue that regulatory solutions for the sharing economy hinge on the understanding of the ways in which the sharing economy is organized. Here, digitalization undermines established regulation through underlying organizational shifts pertaining to places, labor inputs and output responsibilities. Mapping out the field of actors that are or could be involved in regulating the sharing economy, the authors highlight a particular role played not only by digital platforms as market organizers, but also of a variety of other public and private actors such as standard setting organizations, social movements, trade unions, organized buyers and sellers, incumbents, or policy makers. The authors suggest that an understanding of sharing economy markets as fields can not only capture the highly organized nature of the sharing economy, but also serve to untangle the contestations and power dynamics unfolding among various actors engaged in different regulatory issues associated with the sharing economy. Seeing “Uberization” as a next development stage away from the modern corporation after global supply chains, the authors highlight regulatory challenges associated with the even more individualized and dispersed way in which sharing economy markets are organized and also discuss new opportunities for regulation provided by digital technology.

We witness rising tensions between online gig-economy platforms, incumbent firms, regulators, and labor unions. In this chapter, we use the framework of institutional logics as an analytical lens and scheme to understand the fundamental institutional challenges prompted by the advent of the online gig economy. We view gig-economy platforms as corporations that organize and self-regulate markets. In doing so, they span two parallel markets: the market for platforms competing to provide intermediation services and the market for the self-employed competing on platforms to provide peer-to-peer services. Self-regulation by platforms also weakens the traditional roles of the state. While the corporation and market logics empower the platform, they weaken self-employed suppliers as platforms’ design constrain suppliers to grow into a full-fledged business by limiting their entrepreneurial freedom. At the same time, current labor law generally does not classify suppliers as employees of the platform company, which limits the possibility to unionize. The current resolutions to this institutional misalignment are sought in “band aid solutions” at the level of sectors. Instead, as we argue, macro-institutional reform may be needed to re-institutionalize gig work into established institutional logics.