The collaborative and sharing economy: underlying trends, values and tensions

The terms collaborative and sharing economy hold the promise of more sustainable and social societies, where resources are better utilised, strangers get acquainted and new collaborations emerge. Collaboration is motivated by a shift to values seeking to go beyond an overcompetitive, over-individualistic economy and society obsessed with private ownership and property. We see a move from ownership to access of goods. A major driver is the proliferation of online platforms enabling information exchange as well as Internet payment. Consequently, these shifts have resulted in a proliferation of new business and interaction models, facilitating peer-to-peer exchanges, new forms of short rentals from businesses to consumers (B2C) and new kinds of business networks (B2B). However, moving from ownership to access also meets conventional economics, including cost-efficiency, effectiveness, and utility. The platform economy propels new, hyper-capitalist sharing business models, disrupting traditional businesses. While the economy has massively changed, the extent to which this is meeting new values remains an open question. Much of the hype seemingly comes from the craving for new perspectives boosted by economic crises. Like ‘sustainability’, we may be dealing with societal containers and signifiers that are nevertheless performative, transformative and even disruptive. In this light, this chapter maps diverse positions and articulations of the collaborative and sharing economy, starting from three core trends (sharing as an instrument for collective utility, digital sharing platforms, and commons-based sharing and producing). Focusing on three recent cases, we discuss the opportunities, challenges and dilemmas that the sharing economy produces, considering sustainability and social ambitions.