Call for Papers

Peer-to-peer (or sharing) economy is becoming a major part of contemporary capitalism. In this context, phenomena that include ‘joint use’ and ‘mutuality’ become increasingly more visible in terms of value creation and capturing (Arnould & Rose, 2016; Faraj et al., 2016; Giudici et al., 2018). Contemporary incarnations of old relational phenomena (see Mauss, 1923) include work in online communities, co-production platforms, co-creation initiatives, open innovation, collaborative entrepreneurship, collaborative spaces and movements (i.e. co-workers, makers and hackers) and more (Gächter et al., 2010; Daskalaki et al, 2015). If mutuality and sharing become more explicit in contemporary business practices and contemporary societies, can governance actually keep up? Surprisingly, the politics and regulation of these phenomena are rarely covered by the literature in management and organization studies.
 
Yet, the orchestration and regulation of platforms, fab labs, open source communities and co-working spaces may require new modes of solidarity and forms of ‘togetherness’ or new corporate responsabilities (Djelic & Etchanchu, 2015). In other words, the changes induced by the development of these new forms of collaboration are more profound than often acknowledged. From then, various questions and concerns emerge: Do these new modes of governance resemble hierarchies or markets? Do these forms of togetherness evoke resource mobilization as described in the collective action literature (Melucci, 1996; Ostrom, 1998)? What theoretical tools are relevant to capture contemporary phenomena of network and community governance?
 
Further questions arise within the context of the ever-greater level of interconnectedness that underlies modern-day capitalism (Castells, 2013). In other words, what are the spatial consequences of these new collaborative actions? What are the implications of growing collaboration for the city? Can alternative forms of organizing (e.g. lateral collaboration, co-creation endeavours, etc.) conjure up new forms of governance for the city? What are the challenges underlying the governance of smart cities (see Meijer & Bolivar, 2015)? What is the role of digital semiosis and digital infrastructures in the societal transformations of the sharing economy (de Vaujany & Mitev, 2017)? All these questions led us to rethink the role of politics and governance with regards to collaborative spaces and invite us to reflect over the ethical inspirations of the aforementioned collaborative movements.
 
This sub-theme aims at exploring the political dimensions of the sharing economy, its global infrastructures, its underlying political structures, its materiality, its transformative effects for the city and its legitimacy structures. We take the phenomena of sharing and mutuality as starting points for asking questions to organization theory that include but point beyond the firm and its current special and social context of operation: online, urban, global, charitable or terrorist, parochial, destructive, utopian, etc. The material, spatial and temporal dimensions of sharing economy and its political or regulatory processes (Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2012; de Vaujany et al., 2018) will be at the heart of this sub-theme.
 
We invite contributions that explore the following topics:

• Global infrastructures, global platforms, global political effects?

• Reuse and sharing of content and code as political processes

• The politics of open innovation, towards a new managerial democracy?

• The politics of materiality and performativity of the sharing economy, its platforms, infrastructures and new work practices

• Open source politics: Opening knowledge, opening political structures?

• Network governance and open collaboration

• New forms of co-politization

• Regulation of platforms and the sharing economy

• The politics of co-working in the city, the political effects on local territories;

• The maker and hacker movements: DIY and DIT as social movement and new politics for the city

• Smart city, collaboration and governance

• The materiality and spatiality of the sharing economy and their performative effects

• The sharing economy as a neo-liberal move (enacting capitalism differently?)

• The ethics of collaboration

• Hacker and maker movements as new ethics?

• The space and time of the sharing economy as political dimensions

• Gifts, counter-gifts and embodiment and the politics of the body and intercorporeity

References

• Arnould, E.J., & Rose, A.S. (2016): “Mutuality: Critique and substitute for Belk’s ‘sharing’.” Marketing Theory, 16, 75–99.
• Bardhi, F., Eckhardt, G.M., & Arnould, E.J. (2012): “Liquid Relationship to Possessions.” Journal of Consumer Research, 39, 510–529.
• Castells, M. (2013): Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Daskalaki, M., Hjorth, D., & Mair, J. (2015): “Are entrepreneurship, communities, and social transformation related?” Journal of Management Inquiry, 24 (4), 419–423.
• de Vaujany, F-.X., & Mitev, N. (2017): “The post-Macy paradox, information management and organizing: good intentions and road to hell.” Culture & Organization, 23 (5), 379–407.
• de Vaujany, F.-X., Fomin, W., Haefliger, W., & Lyytinen, K. (2018): “Rules, Practices, and Information Technology: A Trifecta of Organizational Regulation.” Information Systems Research, forthcoming, abstract published online on June 28, 2018, https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/isre.2017.0771
• Djelic, M.L., Etchanchu, H. (2015): “Contextualizing corporate political responsibilities: Neoliberal CSR in historical perspective.” Journal of Business Ethics, 131 (2), 1–21.
• Djelic, M.L., & Sahlin-Andersson, K. (2012): “Reordering the World: Transnational Regulatory Governance and its Challenges.” In: D. Levi-Faur (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 745–758.
• Faraj, S., von Krogh, G., Monteiro, E., & Lakhani, K.R. (2016): “Special Section Introduction – Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows.” Information Systems Research, 27, 668–684.
• Gächter, S., von Krogh, G., & Haefliger, S. (2010): “Initiating private-collective innovation: The fragility of knowledge sharing.” Research Policy, 39 (7), 893–906.
• Giudici, A., Reinmoeller, P., & Ravasi, D. (2018): “Open-System Orchestration as a Relational Source of Sensing Capabilities: Evidence from a Venture Association.” Academy of Management Journal, 61 (4), 1369–1402.
• Haefliger, S., von Krogh, G., Spaeth, S. (2008): “Code reuse in open source software.” Management Science, 54 (1), 180–193.
• Mauss, M. (1923, 1973): Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
• Meijer, A., Bolívar, M.P.R. (2016): “Governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance.” International Review of Administrative Sciences, 82 (2), 392–408.
• Melucci, A. (1996): Challenging Codes. Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ostrom, E. (1998): “A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action: Presidential Address, American Political Science Association, 1997.” The American Political Science Review, 92, 1–22.

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