Is Sharing Economy “Pseudo Sharing”

Researches on the sharing economy are now bottlenecked by conceptual confusions and ambiguity. Different scholars define the sharing economy in various and ambiguous ways. The variety and ambiguity in defining the sharing economy become one of factors that impede our deepening researches into the sharing economy. In order to solve this problem, some scholars try to define the sharing economy in terms of the prototypes of sharing, such as mothering and pooling and allocation of resources in family (Belk 2010) and claim that profit-driven “sharing economy”, such as Airbnb and Uber, are in fact “pseudo sharing” (Belk 2014). I disagree with this position. The sharing economy is a new form of business and should not be assessed in terms of the prototype of sharing. The sharing economy should be regarded as part of circular economy, and market exchange should be treated as one of means to making resources circular in a wider scope. The sharing economy consists of two different parts: the nonprofit-driven part and the profit-driven part. The former is the result of social innovation and the latter the result of commercial innovation. The sharing economy is the composition of these two parts. What make this composition possible is the digital and communication revolution. Digital and internet platforms have brought about a new regime of consumption, i.e., the regime of circular consumption, which tend to replace traditional regime of wasteful consumption. With this transformation, commodities bought by consumers and hence de-commodified, can be re-commodified in the sharing economy. This has consequently brought about transformation in private domains.