Institutional work battles in the sharing economy: Unveiling actors and discursive strategies in media discourse

Julian Lehmann, Florian Weber, Matthias Waldkirch, Lorenz Graf-Vlachy and Andreas König

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2022, vol. 184, issue C

Abstract: The rise of the sharing economy represents a disruption for incumbent organizations, institutional regimes, and society at large, causing multiple actor groups to engage in institutional work to create, maintain, and disrupt institutions. While research has provided insights into the ways in which individual actors engage in institutional work, we still lack an understanding of the dynamics between actor groups and the institutional work battles they wage in the context of the emerging sharing economy. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of the discursive institutional work during the rise of Uber and Airbnb, as represented in the news media, we first provide new insights into which actors groups engage in institutional work and which rhetoric they utilize. We inductively distill 15 discursive strategies of institutional work related to seven institutional discourses. Moreover, enfolding extant literature, we derive a taxonomy of institutional work battles and introduce the concept of cross-countering—defined as efforts to weaken, oppose, or nullify opposing discursive institutional work. Altogether, our work provides novel insights on institutional work in the sharing economy, highlights the contested nature of institutional discourses and formalizes when such contestation fosters or hinders institutional change.

Keywords: Sharing economy; Discursive institutional work; Incumbent firms; New entrants; Institutional change; Media analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162522005236
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:184:y:2022:i:c:s0040162522005236

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2022.122002

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().