Dimensions of digital inequality in the sharing economy

ABSTRACT

Sharing economy platforms have grown to offer various commercial opportunities to a growing but still limited user base. We conceptualize engagement in the sharing economy as a form of online participation, and apply a digital inequalities perspective to examine the social stratification of commercial sharing. Based on the Internet access model established by Van Dijk, we analyze the effects of social structural antecedents on various access stages. Initial studies indicate that the sharing economy is characterized by second-order consumption, addressing user wants more than needs. Therefore, we draw on Bourdieu to complement Van Dijk’s model through a habitual perspective. Analyzing data collected in a survey of more than 6000 individuals from 12 European countries, we find that while social structural antecedents are critical in explaining initial usage of sharing services, their effect on repeat usage is less evident. Some indicators, such as education and social capital, even negatively relate to usage intensity. In turn, we find that a habitus of innovativeness and community-orientation significantly bolsters initial usage, but materialism, rather than material requirements, characterizes higher levels of engagement in the sharing economy.

KEYWORDS:

• sharing economy
• collaborative consumption
• digital inequality
• habitus
• structural equation modeling

Acknowledgements

We thank the European Union for the generous funding within the Horizon 2020 project ‘Ps2Share – Participation, Privacy, and Power in the Sharing Economy’ (732117).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data set used for the analysis is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1122633.

Notes

1. Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom

2. lavaan beta Version 0.6-1.1204, R Version 3.4.0

3. All metric score variables calculated roughly but not perfectly follow normal distributions.

4. Example: Respondent A expects financial benefits, meeting new people, sustainability, and having fun to be important, important, very important, and important respectively. For the variable ‘motivational access’, A is coded as ‘very important’ meaning A expects at least one benefit to be very important when participating in the sharing economy.

5. In the following, we will not differentiate between the different countries in our sample. As we tested the model for each country separately, we did not find any systematic variation between the countries.

6. In the analysis, a model testing for interaction effects between SES and habitual dispositions following the idea of a motivation contingency model (cf. Kwak, 1999) was considered as well. To do so, the sample was classified into three subsamples representing low, medium, and high SES along with household income, education, working status, and place of residence. The model was computed for all three status groups separately. The results did not reveal relevant differences that would indicate any interaction effects between SES and habitual dispositions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 LEIT Information and Communication Technologies [grant number 732117].

Notes on contributors

Thomas Eichhorn

Thomas Eichhorn is a research associate at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Leipzig. His research centers on the topics digital inequality and online participation. Further research interests include social network analysis and work in the digital era [email: [email protected]].

Sebastian Jürss

Sebastian Jürss has been a research associate at the Chair of Communication Management at the University of Leipzig since March 2017. His work is mainly concerned with participation in and the imagined futures of the sharing economy. Since September 2019, he works as a research associate at the SOCIUM (Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy) at the University of Bremen [email: [email protected]].

Christian P. Hoffmann

Christian P. Hoffmann is Professor of Communication Management at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Leipzig. In addition, he is responsible for teaching in the field of political communication in cooperation with the Institute for Political Science. Hoffman is a lecture at the University of St. Gallen, Singapore Management University, Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz and University of Applied Sciences Zurich. His research interests include strategic communication management, financial communication and political communication – with a particular focus on the challenges and opportunities provided by new media [email: [email protected]].