Empowering and resisting in a sharing economy: Two sides of the same coin

Abstract

Some can regard the sharing economy (SE) as a sustainable economy for allowing innovative (even disruptive) business opportunities and for encouraging new forms of consumption. There are, however, controversies about SE’s role in being a commercially-oriented economy taking advantage of regulatory and market failures. Such ambiguous trajectories provide opportunities for research, and one of them brings attention to power’s exercise to promote or influence change. This research, a single-case study of Uber, aims to understand the connections between framings to empower and to resist in a SE context. Three two-sided (empower and resist) perspectives – the economic system, the business market, and the sustainable-driven perspectives – and two strengthening actions – searching for legitimacy and fighting and calling for status quo – arise within the SE context analyzed. Empowering framings sounded more convincing compared to resisting ones, and resisting framings highlighted contradictions not expected from SE initiatives. Our findings suggest that SE does have the potential to stimulate a kind of non-reversible sustainable mindset, but this path choice is still unclear.