Looking at the ‘sharing’ economies concept through the prism of informality

Borbála Kovács, Jeremy Morris, Abel Polese and Drini Imami

Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2017, vol. 10, issue 2, 365-378

Abstract: How do the ‘sharing economies’ relate to the long history of informal economic practices as understood in the social sciences? This article examines conceptions of the sharing economy in terms of its relation to scholarship on informality. By using two case studies of informal economic practices that originated in socialist-era societies and continue to the present day in modified forms, we critique the notion that sharing economies are significantly novel in form or logic, other than technologically. We draw attention to the variety of informal economy practices to discuss how they may be socially embedded or disembedded. The main focus on global technological leveraging of productivity and connectivity in sharing economy practices would suggest that many aspects are akin to disembedded forms of informality. Scholarship needs to address the ongoing disciplinary parallelism on prefixed ‘economies’—in doing so it would provide a better contextual and theoretical understanding of ‘sharing economies’.

Keywords: sharing economy; informality; embeddedness; post-socialism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H24 H27 M13 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cjres/rsw046 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:cjrecs:v:10:y:2017:i:2:p:365-378.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society is currently edited by Judith Clifton, Anna Davies, Betsy Donald, Emil Evenhuis, Stefania Fiorentino (Associate Editor), Harry Garretsen, Meric Gertler, Amy Glasmeier, Mia Gray, Robert Hassink, Dieter Kogler, Michael Kitson, Linda Lobao, Charles van Marrewijk, Ron Martin, Peter Sunley, Peter Tyler and Chun Yang

More articles in Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society from Cambridge Political Economy Society Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().