Читать книгу Sharing Economy and Big Data Analytics - Soraya Sedkaoui - Страница 24

Etymologically speaking, the word “to share” comes from the Latin partes agere: partes means “to make equal parts” and agere means “to push” and “to activate”. As a result, the concept has existed since antiquity and combines the two meanings: to divide an entity for a specific purpose. This can be a sharing of inheritance to benefit all heirs, or a sharing of power to delegate certain responsibilities.

In the notion of the “sharing economy”, each of the two words has kept its specificity.

Sharing always means leaving a part of something that belongs to us to one or more people, no matter how this action is carried out. It is the combination of the two words that makes the difference.

Indeed, the sharing economy has become the apanage of the solidarity economy and has experienced a staggering growth in recent years thanks to the development of information technology and mobile technology. Via software, or more precisely platforms, business transactions and meetings between suppliers and service providers are growing exponentially.

The term “sharing economy” was first added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2015. Similarly, the scientific literature on the concept is relatively new. Researchers looked at different aspects of the sharing economy using different names.

Among the names used, we can mention:

 – peer-to-peer economy;

 – collaborative economy;

 – collaborative production and collaborative consumption;

 – access economy;

 – consumption based on access;

 – local economy;

 – peer production based on commonality and mesh size;

 – product-system service and on-demand economy;

 – wholesale economics;

 – platform economy.

Nevertheless, the term “sharing economy” is the most commonly used term in the literature (Ranjbari et al. 2018).

“We believe that the economy of sharing can be the defining story of the 21st Century if we come together to build it.” These are the words of Natalie Foster, co-founder and executive director of Peers.org. The defenders of this ideology want to fight overconsumption and waste, create social equity and make the shared economy the “economic model of the third millennium”.

The sharing economy wants to break with the consumption practices that have occurred since the Industrial Revolution, where consumers are forced to consume excessively. It began after the Second World War and reached its peak in the years known as the Glorious Thirty.

Consumer society was born with the advent of Taylor’s theory and the launch of assembly line work. This process has resulted in an abundance of products and reduced prices, which have become accessible to all segments of society.

The bewitching power of advertising must be added to this, which manipulates the consumer at the whim of producers:

Advertising is the main instrument of manipulation, in fact, it conditions, brings a subliminal perception and influences the population subconsciously. Over the years, it has mobilized mental manipulation techniques from human sciences to encourage consumers to buy.¹

Without question, the consumer society has allowed man to satisfy his every desire for goods and services and to live in unavoidable comfort. A vehicle for moving, water and energy brought to your home, sophisticated objects for entertainment and many other gadgets. Nevertheless, it has had negative consequences, which have been denounced since the 1960s, in particular by George Katona, inventor of the term “consumer society” and initiator of consumer psychology.

At that time, “markets were not yet globalized; private and public spheres of life were not as commercialized as today; and the information and digital communication society was not yet born” (Reisch 2008).

The alternative to the consumer society was the unrelenting collaborative society, which aims to deal with the hyper-consumption that has governed consumer behavior for several years. The pivot of this new trend is “collaborative consumption”, which is defined as “the set of resource circulation systems that allow consumers to use and provide valuable resources temporarily or permanently, through direct interaction with another consumer or through a mediator” (Decrop 2017).

The concept of collaborative consumption was initiated by Felson and Spaeth in 1978, long before the boom in mobile technology and social networks, with a different objective than the one that is “now attributed to the concept” (Ertz 2017).

Collaborative consumption has changed the subjective conception of the value of goods and services, well known in the currents of economic thought. Indeed, collaborative consumption is based on a new principle of “access/use rather than purchase/ownership of goods, capital or services”, by pooling their personal resources (Decrop 2017).

Collaborative consumption is considered an economic model, in that it has brought about change in society by using old values, such as giving and altruism.

By affirming that collaborative consumption is the ultimate alternative to excessive consumption, Botsman and Rogers (2010) use examples of companies “within this model” in order to highlight the specificities of the different practices and trends of this new consumption model (Bicrel 2012).

This view is shared by a large number of authors who argue that collaborative behavior is increasingly becoming a socio-economic option for the economic crises of the capitalist model and a possible response to environmental problems.

The “abandonment” of abusive consumption behavior is imminent, and even if it is does not happen today, it is starting to seep into individuals’ morals. It is now the objective of the collaborative economy.