The Sharing Economy: The Production, Consumption, and Regulation of Community in the Digital Economy

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2015
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
The "sharing economy" is an economic, technological, and ideological movement that has become one of the fastest growing economic trends in Silicon Valley. This thesis will examine the ideology of the sharing economy - focusing on two companies, Airbnb and Lyft - and its relation to the business model, commodity nature, and labor models of the sharing economy in practice. Powered by a dialectical tension between communitarianism and neoliberalism - a tension informed by Californian Ideology - the sharing economy destabilizes the nature of service commodities, the boundaries between the commercial and the "authentic," and the distinctions between the producer and the consumer. With the sharing economy as my lens, I pursue these questions in order to understand some of the larger trends in the growth of the digital economy.
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