The Culture of Sharing: Critical Research of the Sharing Economy and its Cultural Consequences in Europe
Abstract
The emerging sharing economy breaks down certain capitalist laws giving rise to a new concept of business characterized by concepts such as swapping, exchanging, collaborative consumption, shared ownership, self-management, shared value, cooperatives, renting, lending, peer-to-peer (P2P), collaborative economy and crowdfunding. The sharing economy is getting power over the classic.
Economic patterns performing in a new online peer-to-peer market in which users become producers and consumers at the same time. As many experts anticipate, the most striking repercussion of such an economy would be the development of a market in which products and services are nearly free due to their low cost of production (Rifkin, 2014; Anderson, 2012; Gansky, 2010).
Aspects such as the digitalization of physical goods or the shift from ""ownership"" to ""access"" are playing an important role in this new business model. This paper focuses on plans for researching the ""Culture of Sharing"" within a European context throughout the PhD period (2014-2017).
Using a web tracking system the research will analyze the user's evolution of the main businesses representative of the sharing economy in order to know their relevance within the population. The aims of the project are 1) develop a deep critical analysis of the study field with the purpose of understanding how ""sharing business"" works nowadays: 2) to understand which cultural facts make possible the integration of this new economic model in European countries and 3) draw a common user profile of this kind of sharing culture.
The methodology to be implemented integrates qualitative and quantitative data; thus, the procedure contemplates bibliographic references and complete online research using data tracking, questionnaires and keywords' techniques.