Green entrepreneurship in the sharing economy: utilising multiplicity of institutional logics

Abstract

The green potential of the sharing economy to exploit underutilised or redundant resources has generated a considerable interest and expectations on the part of government institutions, investors and consumers. Alongside the emerging green logic, more established economic and social logics appear to be critical for growth of sharing platforms. Applying an institutional logics approach, this paper investigates how entrepreneurial teams in the sharing economy deal with this complexity of expectations of various constituents and institutions. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews with founders and executives of UK sharing platforms, we examine the strategies used by entrepreneurial teams to utilise and combine the green logic with other institutional logics present. The results demonstrate that sharing platforms are able to grow via utilising the green logic together with the economic and social logics in a flexible manner, applying complexity reducing and complexity absorbing strategies as well as temporal adjustments in the use of logics.

Online and Offline Communities in the Sharing Economy

“…However, it is easy to imagine alternative explanations as well. For example, it has been suggested that many sharing economy platforms emphasize environmental and communal values to convince regulators of their positive societal effects [50,51].…”

How Corporate Sharewashing Practices Undermine Consumer Trust

“…Such initiatives are stressing the promises and positive effects of sharing for the society and the environment [96]. However, prominently claiming the promising green and social logics may cause consumers to become especially aware of the potential and actual detrimental external effects of sharing businesses [97][98][99]. This may, for example, include considerations about consumptive rebound effects [62], legal and regulatory concerns [74], the economization of formerly non-economic domains [7,39], aggravation local housing markets [100], discrimination [76,77], or the creating of a gig/sharing precariat [39].…”

Circular Economy for Clothes Using Web and Mobile Technologies—A Systematic Review and a Taxonomy Proposal

“…Vadim et al [33] The authors analyse the potential of sharing economies, how they can be used to explore different kinds of resources and how entrepreneurial teams deal with the expectations and complexity of different institutions.…”

“…In Reference [33], the authors discuss the green logic and environmental benefits and unknown downsides of a shared economy. The authors mentioned the different schemes used to define a shared-economy and which actors are involved in the said economy, with the most common ones being the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) that occupy 3 4 of the defined models.…”