URBAN SHARING TEAM PRESENTS RESEARCH AT THE 5th IWSE

The i-share team at Mannheim University, Germany organised the 5th International Workshop on the Sharing Economy on 28th and 29th June 2018. The previous Workshop was organised by our Urban Sharing team in Lund, which sent out a team of three researchers to participate at this year’s sharing event of the year: Yuliya Voytenko Palgan, Lucie Zvolska and Steven Curtis.

Yuliya Voytenko Palgan presented her research co-authored with Professor Oksana Mont and Lucie Zvolska on the roles city governments take to govern sharing organisations, and what actions they can take to benefit from urban sharing.

Lucie Zvolska presented her article co-written with Professor Oksana Mont and Yuliya Voytenko Palgan on how sharing organisations create and disrupt institutions (currently in review in the special volume on the sharing economy in the Journal of Cleaner Production).

Steven Curtis shared his research done together with Matthias Lehner, where they explored the meaning of the sharing economy (also in review in the special volume).

The Workshop brought together more than 50 presentations on the sharing economy from 15 countries, and was a divided into parallel sessions focused on various perspectives: sociology, organisation theory, linguistics and semantics, IT, economy and strategy.

Compared to the previous years, we have seen an increase in the spectrum of theoretical perspectives used to analyse the sharing economy, such as semantics. We also noticed an increased interest in the research of environmental impacts of the sharing economy, and in the analysis of sharing platforms through the lenses of organisation and institutional theories. Furthermore, papers were presented on sharing in geographical areas which had previously received little coverage in the sharing economy literature, such as South Africa or Hungry.

The academic community is taking an increasingly broader and deeper look at urban sharing, and the 5th Workshop on the Sharing Economy was a proof that, in the words of Rachel Botsman, research on the sharing economy is here it stay.