Property sharing is one of the most prominent examples of the rapidly expanding sharing economy. Travelers around the world often opt to stay at a stranger's apartment instead of any other tourism accommodation. Trust is essential in this choice, because staying with, or taking in, strangers can entail great risks. To create trust between users, sharing platforms often promote a sense of community. However, the relation between sense of community and trust in the sharing economy is still largely unknown. To investigate this relation, both hosts and guests of two sharing platforms, namely Airbnb and SabbaticalHomes, were surveyed. The findings indicate that sense of community indeed enhances trust between users. Moreover, the evidence suggests that hosts have a stronger sense of community than guests. Also, a significantly higher sense of community was found on the platform where identification between users is higher. This study shows that affect for the community contributes to the understanding of trust in the sharing economy.
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Geographers have long pondered the role of tourism in producing and shaping space. The description of resort geographies popular in the 1980s and 1990s has gradually given way to the current vogue for place-making and place marketing, re-centering geography in the tourism field. More recently, however, the rise of the sharing economy and “relational tourism” has caused researchers to look beyond the construction and consumption of place and to delve into the co-creation of localities between tourists and residents. These shorter and longer-term “locals” increasingly find each other without the intervention of the traditional tourism industry, giving rise to whole new fields of economic, cultural and social exchange. The growth of companies such as Couchsurfing, Airbnb and Uber not only represents a challenge to traditional views of tourism, but is also reshaping the localities inhabited by tourists. This analysis examines the consequences of the new localities of tourism and they ways in which this might affect the future of tourism itself.
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Globalisation and new information technology are bringing significant changes to tourism. Tourism experiences are now increasingly being co-produced by tourism companies, tourists and local residents. This has significant implications for cities such as Barcelona, where there has been an explosion of new tourism products through new intermediaries such as Airbnb. As a result, tourism is penetrating further into the fabric of the city, and is also being produced by the residents of Barcelona themselves. Perhaps for this reason they complain less about the negative effects of tourism than might be expected.
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The circular economy (CE) is heralded as reducing material use and emissions while providing more jobs and growth. We explored this narrative in a series of expert workshops, basing ourselves on theories, methods and findings from science fields such as global environmental input-output analysis, business modelling, industrial organisation, innovation sciences and transition studies. Our findings indicate that this dominant narrative suffers from at least three inconvenient truths. First, CE can lead to loss of GDP. Each doubling of product lifetimes will halve the related industrial production, while the required design changes may cost little. Second, the same mechanism can create losses of production jobs. This may not be compensated by extra maintenance, repair or refurbishing activities. Finally, ‘Product-as-a-Service’ business models supported by platform technologies are crucial for a CE transition. But by transforming consumers from owners to users, they lose independence and do not share in any value enhancement of assets (e.g., houses). As shown by Uber and AirBNB, platforms tend to concentrate power and value with providers, dramatically affecting the distribution of wealth. The real win-win potential of circularity is that the same societal welfare may be achieved with less production and fewer working hours, resulting in more leisure time. But it is perfectly possible that powerful platform providers capture most added value and channel that to their elite owners, at the expense of the purchasing power of ordinary people working fewer hours. Similar undesirable distributional effects may occur at the global scale: the service economies in the Global North may benefit from the additional repair and refurbishment activities, while economies in the Global South that are more oriented towards primary production will see these activities shrink. It is essential that CE research comes to grips with such effects. Furthermore, governance approaches mitigating unfair distribution of power and value are hence essential for a successful circularity transition.
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