Event overview
This marketing research seminar by Alessandro Gandini (King's College, London) explores the concept of reputation within the sharing economy.
The centrality of reputation in sharing practices, through rankings and ratings, has been hailed by collaborative consumption advocates as a key component for the successful development of the sharing economy (Botsman and Rogers, 2011). Others (e.g. Eckhardt and Bardhi, 2015; Belk, 2014) have instead criticised the nature of the ‘sharing’ practices involved in this context, suggesting that these look more akin to an evolution of market-based economies rather than instruments which promote collaboration and commoning. Recently, a number of empirical researches has shed further light on the dynamics by which reputational mechanisms are intertwined with sharing practices. These have confirmed how reputation is instrumental in the motivation towards participating in sharing activity (Hamari et al., 2016), in fostering perceptions of trustworthiness among users (Ert et al., 2016) and for self-regulatory behaviour (Cohen and Sundararajan, 2016). However, these studies largely focus primarily on the role reputation plays within these domains. A more comprehensive reflection on the significance of reputation within contexts of sharing, particularly from a critical sociological perspective, has struggled to develop.
This paper seeks to follow in these footsteps and aims to assess the evolution of reputation and its significance within sharing contexts. It does so by bringing forward the suggestion that reputation may represent, in a Polanyian sense, a ‘fictitious commodity’ in the emergent sharing economy. The notion of ‘fictitious commodity’ is owed to Karl Polanyi’s (1944) The Great Transformation, which portrayed the rise of a market economy as a result of the rise of the modern state and the diffusion of industrial capitalism. Polanyi identifies three ‘fictitious commodities’: labor, land and money. These, he argues, are instrumental to the functioning of a market economy insofar as they are treated as commodities on a market without actually being so. This ‘fiction’, in Polanyi’s account, becomes a vital organizing principle for market economies, which allows to anchor social relations to value production. Following on from Jessop (2007), who argued on knowledge as a fictitious commodity in informational capitalism, I contend reputation has surged to represent a fictitious commodity in sharing practices, especially digitally-mediated one, to enable the creation of value across self-regulating markets. Akin to money, labor and land in the early market economy, reputation has come to represent a ‘symbolic token’ (Jessop, 2007) that allows the exchange of goods and services across platforms, its ‘fictitious’ status given by the algorithmic elaborations through which it is commodified.
Alessandro Gandini is a Lecturer in Digital Media Management and Innovation in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College, London
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Jun 2018 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
Accessibility
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