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In this chapter, sharing economy, also called the gig economy, is discussed as part of the digital economy. This research analyzes the main difficulties of gig workers, and their needs will be analyzed as one of the crucial issues. This research also seeks to examine the government's role in prior economies and the sharing economy of today. In addition, existing legislation and procedures for gig workers will be compared across nations. Furthermore, some of the most important initiatives to engage with the sharing economy are also investigated. Methods such as “word frequency query” and “exploration diagrams,” which are supported by NVivo qualitative research software, are utilized in order to accomplish this research. In this study, the interview method occurs with an expert that is considered in order to observe both the government's stance on the sharing economy and its practical effects. The research discloses that government engagement in the sharing economy is inevitable, and the adoption of existing policies is challenging.

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.

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.

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 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.

Is the sharing economy a field? Answering this question is crucial to understanding how sharing organizations look and behave, as well as how the sharing economy might develop. In this chapter, the authors applied two different field conceptions – organizational field and issue field – as a starting point for an explorative empirical analysis. To capture both field concepts, the authors collected relational data and data on organizations’ self-representations to see how organizations engaged in the debate on the sharing economy relate to each other. The observed network of organizations suggests that the sharing economy is an issue field. In addition, the core of this network shows the relational structure of an organizational field. Surprisingly, it is not an organizational field of the sharing economy. Instead, it is a field of organizations heavily engaged in proselytizing new organizational forms that will change other fields. What the authors observed is a new field configuration – the authors call it a disruptive field – that is, less inward-oriented than other fields but much more engaged in changing other fields’ structures and dynamics. With these insights, the authors contribute to institutional research on field configuration and shed light on the phenomenon of the sharing economy and its potential development.

Over the last years, and under the umbrella of the “sharing economy,” various new social practices and novel business models have been established worldwide. Such practices and models are perceived both as opportunity and challenge for existing (urban) public governance regimes. It is in this sense that the sharing economy has become a contested issue and regularly provokes bold governance responses. However, local governing authorities first need to interpret, negotiate, and establish what exactly is “at issue” in order to (re-)act adequately. While such “politics of signification” are well-studied, for instance, in social movements and public media discourse, research on the concerted framing activities of public administrations as well as on the strategic work that sets the stage for public policy-making is relatively sparse – and entirely lacking for the context of the sharing economy. In this chapter, the authors look behind the scenes of the policy-making in the City of Vienna, Austria. The empirical findings unearth six distinct mechanisms –“delimiting,” “negotiating,” “detailing,” “linking,” “justifying,” and “situating” – that are strategically applied to shape the “Viennese way” of governing the sharing economy. This research develops an in-depth understanding of what the authors conceptually dub “strategic issue work”: the manifold efforts that lead to, and underlie, in this case, the policy-making of a local government when it tries to come to terms with the governance challenges of the sharing economy.