From Solidity to Liquidity: Macro-Level Consumption Patterns in the Sharing Economy

Introduction

Almost 40 years ago, Fırat and Dholakia (1982) reflected on macro-level consumption patterns in market-dominated modernity and provided a comparably gloomy outlook on consumer welfare and societal well-being. The modern project originally sought to liberate the human individual from all forms of impositions and oppressions in order to build a grand future and allow individuals to exercise their free will to reach their maximum potential (Fırat 2013; Fırat and Dholakia 2017). However, as modernity progressed, the economic worldview came to be the guiding principle and the market took center stage (Fırat 2013). The economic domain quickly began to overshadow the other domains of human culture—the political and the social, and marketization forced materialization of use value into exchange value (Fırat and Dholakia 2017). Thus, anything that was of use value became translated into exchange value, resulting in commodification, objectification, and accumulation (Slater and Tonkiss 2001). Congruent with this dominance of the market, Fırat and Dholakia (1982) identified macro-level consumption patterns in contemporary society that were predominantly passive, individualistic, private, and alienated. These overall unfavorable patterns were driven by the forces of capital accumulation and the dominance of the market system (Fırat and Dholakia 1998).

Fast-forwarding 30 years, the substantial growth of so-called sharing platforms suggests that an alternative consumption mode may gain momentum with the potential to increase consumer agency, provide flexibility and self-determination to employees, and advance overall welfare for society and other stakeholders such as the natural environment (compare for a critical analysis of these potential benefits, e.g. Hamari, Sjöklint, and Ukkonen 2016; Mikolajewska-Zając 2019). Access-based consumption platforms such as AirBnB (short-term rental), Uber (personal transport), Stashbee (storing), Fiverr (freelancing), and Silvernest (baby boomer room matching) have changed market structures and even disrupted whole industries (Sundararajan 2016). The overarching logic of the majority of these marketspaces is that underused capacity is offered to other consumers for a fee. Thus, despite frequently being labeled as the sharing economy, market exchange and profit seem to drive these platforms rather than instances of “real” (e.g., altruistic or community-based) sharing as outlined by Belk (2010). Congruent with this line of reasoning, Eckhardt and Bardhi (2016) classify the sharing economy as an instance of market-mediated access and distinguish it from practices of non-market-mediated access. Importantly, drawing on Polanyi’s (1957/2011) distinction between social and economic exchange, Eckhardt and Bardhi (2016) suggest that the sharing economy relies on economic rather than social exchange, with the consequence that the sharing economy resembles an extension of the neoliberal marketplace rather than an anti-consumerist movement able to increase individual and societal well-being (Eckhardt, Varman, and Dholakia 2018). Providing a similar assessment, the sharing economy has been equated with “neoliberalism on steroids” (Murillo, Buckland, and Val 2017) and “sharewashing,” (akin to greenwashing and whitewashing), a practice that misleads consumers by purposely positioning it as a model of social and ecological principles while in fact consumers’ agency and participation remain limited (Hawlitschek et al. 2018).

Nevertheless, critics of the sharing economy acknowledge that even though the sharing economy is predominantly market-based and profit driven (Frenken and Schor, 2017; Schor 2014), practices of altruistic or community-based sharing are frequently interwoven with commercial sharing platforms. This tension between altruistic acts of authentic sharing and the profit-driven ideology of market-meditated access has been termed the paradox of the sharing economy (Belk, Eckhardt, and Bardhi 2019). For example, drawing on duality theory, Habibi, Kim, and Laroche (2016) suggest that essentially all non-ownership practices of consumption include both aspects of authentic sharing and market-driven exchange. In a similar vein, Scaraboto (2015) observes that many new consumption modes are hybrid and include both market-based exchange and elements of altruistic sharing. Hence, the question to what extent the sharing economy facilitates the transition from a passive-individual-private-alienated towards a more active-collective-public-participatory macro-level consumption pattern (Fırat and Dholakia 1982; 1998) is non-trivial and warrants further exploration.

The current research addresses this research gap and strives to update Fırat and Dholakia’s macro-level framework of consumption patterns with the new conditions of the sharing economy. We argue that a focus on this specific framework is pertinent because it constitutes the only comprehensive framework that addresses the development of consumption patterns and simultaneously provides a macro-level perspective to the reader by exploring the implications of consumption trends at the societal level. Following Eckhardt et al. (2019), we define the sharing economy as a “scalable socioeconomic system that employs technology enabled platforms to provide users with temporary access to tangible and intangible resources that may be crowdsourced” (p. 7). With consumption going through a gradual shift from ownership to post ownership (Belk 2014), we reflect on how consumption patterns are shaped by the sharing economy. Specifically, we analyze whether and under which conditions the sharing economy may entail a shift of the previously identified passive-individual-private-alienated consumption (Fırat and Dholakia 1982; 1998) towards a more active-collective-public-participatory pattern of macro-level consumption. For example, does the sharing economy advance social relationships and consumer participation or rather retrogress them? Further, what are the effects of the sharing economy on commodification and consumers’ sentiment of alienation (Dholakia and Levy 1987; Fırat and Dholakia 2017)? This paper strives to critically evaluate these issues. Our paper contributes to current explorations of the sharing economy in the extant literature (e.g., Eckhardt et al. 2019; Frenken and Schor 2017; Hellwig et al. 2015) by offering a different angle on the phenomenon through a macro-level approach motivated by a framework of consumption patterns. Specifically, our analysis of consumption patterns contributes to the macromarketing literature by showing that even though the sharing economy implies a shift from solid to liquid consumption, this transition is sideward rather than upward because consumption alternatives in the sharing economy remain within the boundaries of market-mediated exchange and thus fail to generate substantive higher-level consumption alternatives between modes of consumption. Thus, the sharing economy struggles to facilitate a shift from passive-individual-private-alienated consumption towards more active-collective-public-participatory macro-level consumption patterns. To that end, we first present an overview of the sharing economy and market-mediated access and then advance a critical inquiry of macro-level consumption patterns that emerge from the sharing economy. We conclude our article with a discussion of the implications for the macromarketing literature and suggestions of avenues for future research.

Sharing and the Sharing Economy

Sharing has traditionally occurred within intimate social-economic systems (e.g., on the level of the household) and is defined as “the allocation of economic goods and services without calculating returns” (Price 1975, p. 4). Sharing behavior dates back to primitive hunter-gatherer societies, typically among those who did not practice storage (Dowling 1968; Marshall 1961; Woodburn 1998). Considering the uncertainty of the next hunt, meat sharing insured the hunter-gatherers of their future meals (Knight 2012). In their ethnographic work with members of a remote Australian Indigenous community, Godinho et al. (2017) observe that indigenous organization is based on a collectivist ethos that is sustained by the intra-familial sharing of resources. In East Germany, during the time period before the fall of the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, non-market-mediated community sharing was often the only feasible answer to alleviate severe resource scarcity (Wolf and Ritz 2018). ¹ These examples illustrate that reciprocity and exchange are not fundamental constituents of sharing (Belk 2007, Price 1975). Thus, sharing operates outside the logic of the market and outside of the realm of trademarks, copyrights, and intellectual property rights (Belk and Llamas 2012). For example, even though gift giving (compare Sherry 1993) may intuitively be seen as a form of sharing, Belk (2010) points out that sharing should be distinguished from the more formalized ritual of gift giving because the latter extends beyond the ordinary social context and imposes either reciprocity or a debt on the recipient. Both sharing and gift-giving create and reinforce social bonds; however, sharing is non-ritualistic and involves everyday items that are not specifically selected to fit a particular person (Belk 2016).

Compared to the perspective outlined above, the sharing economy seems to incorporate very little elements of “true” sharing. Eckhardt et al. (2019) identified temporary access, transfer of economic value, platform mediation, an expanded consumer role, and crowdsourced supply as fundamental characteristics of the sharing economy. Temporary access in the sharing economy is market-mediated rather than non-market-mediated (Eckhardt and Bardhi 2016) and thus profit-driven rather than motivated by social relationships. Frenken and Schor (2017) suggest that part of a definition of the sharing economy pertains to access of under-utilized assets (i.e., idle capacity), which sounds attractive because at a macro-level, a less intensive and thus more sustainable use of resources should be the result (compare, e.g. Bucher, Fieseler, and Lutz 2016; Cohen and Kietzmann 2014; Cohen and Muñoz 2016). However, this potential benefit of the sharing economy raises important questions because it may be argued that in many instances, capacity in sharing economy platforms is in fact not idle but rather generated based on market demand. For example, Uber and Lyft drivers rarely offer idle capacity to other passengers (in the sense that they would have driven to the target destination without the specific demand from the paying customer). Against this background, it is still debated to what extent the sharing economy incorporates aspects of “true” sharing and whether it constitutes an escape from market-based, profit-driven exchange or rather an extension of such systems. The economic and social impact of the sharing economy has indeed been substantial. For example, Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers (2017) estimate that AirBnB’s entry into the Texas market had a quantifiable negative local room revenue that amounts to 8-10% in larger cities such as Austin, TX, and Dogru, Mody, and Suess (2019) find a substantial negative impact of AirBnB on room revenues, average daily rates, and occupancy rates in ten major U.S. hotel markets for the period between July 2008 and June 2017. These radical shifts come with a number of concerns. For example, the entry of venture capitalists and investment banks in the sharing market may further increase the market power of platform owners through their influence on regulations and ability to evade taxes (Gregory and Halff 2017; Murillo, Buckland, and Val 2017). Another concern is that the sharing economy is powered by algorithms that enable dynamic pricing models and the generation of big data, which creates unique challenges for regulators (Srnicek 2017). Thus, the overall social and economic impacts of the sharing economy are controversial. Supported by technology such as the Internet and app-based electronic platforms (Perren and Kozinets 2018; Stephany 2015), companies representing the sharing economy facilitate flexible, non-ownership-based lifestyles and provide seamless on-demand access to their users (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Bardhi, Eckhardt, and Arnould 2012). However, this access is market-mediated and thus follows the principles of exchange and profit-orientation rather than the tenets of “true” sharing as outlined by Belk (2007, 2010). Consequently, Eckhardt and Bardhi (2016) point out that the sharing element of the sharing economy is typically absent or underrepresented. Because access in the sharing economy is market-based and exchange-driven, it may be argued that companies in the sharing economy do not function differently from traditional companies that are interested in staying ahead of the competition and achieving monopolistic power (Srnicek 2017). Against this background, we now turn towards our critical assessment of the sharing economy based on Fırat and Dholakia’s (1982) macro-level framework of consumption patterns.

Macro-Level Consumption Patterns in the Sharing Economy

Fırat and Dholakia (1982, p.7) defined consumption patterns as the “set of relationships in which a consumer unit becomes involved during the act of consumption”. A consumer unit can be conceptualized at varying levels, such as the individual, the household, a group, a specific social class, or society as a whole (Fırat and Dholakia 1977). An overwhelming amount of consumer research on consumption patterns has been conducted at the micro-level of consumption (typically at the individual or household level). For example, Balderjahn (1988) tests the influence of personality traits, attitudes, and demographic variables on ecologically responsible consumption patterns at the individual level, and Schäfer, Jaeger-Erben, and Bamberg (2012) investigate the influence of life events such as child birth and relocation on consumption patterns of sustainable lifestyles at the household level. However, research related to consumption patterns at the macro (that is, societal) level is less common.

Our assessment of the sharing economy draws on Fırat and Dholakia’s (1982) framework of macro-level consumption patterns. This framework consists of four dimensions that “characterize the most critical trends in modern consumption” (Fırat and Dholakia 1998, p. 9): Human activity, social relationship, domain of availability, and level of participation. Human activity addresses the combined physical and mental activity during consumption and ranges from passive to active. Passive consumption occurs at low levels of physical and mental activity, for example when watching a less engaging television program. Active consumption occurs under high levels of physical and/or mental activity, such as playing tennis with a friend. Social relationship addresses consumers’ relationship with other consumers during the act of consumption and ranges from individual to collective consumption. For example, having lunch alone constitutes individual consumption, whereas having a shared meal with neighbors and friends is an example of collective consumption. Domain of availability explores to what extent a product or service is available to the members of society and ranges from private access to public availability. If access is restricted (e.g., an online video game requires registration and payment and can be accessed only by the registered player), consumption is private. On the other hand, free open-air movie events or public parks are examples of public consumption. Finally, level of participation refers to the extent consumers are involved in determining the rules and procedures of consuming a product or service. For example, when consumers actively plan a river rafting trip and determine the rules and procedures of doing so, they are engaging in participatory consumption. On the other hand, when consumers are not involved in the design of such a trip and just follow instructions, consumption can become alienated. It is important to point out that these dimensions can correlate with each other, but they do not have to. For example, building a Lego set out of the box based on the instructions may involve mental and physical activity (representing active consumption on the human activity domain), but most probably remains at a low or moderate level of participation because the consumer is not involved in the design or creative modification of the build and just follows the instructions provided.

The outlook provided by Fırat and Dholakia (1998) for consumers in modernity in the context of countries such as the United States (with its emphasis on convenience and possessions as an extension of the self) is quite pessimistic. Specifically, the authors contend that modern society is characterized by a trend towards an increasingly passive-individualistic-private-alienated pattern of consumption. Such a pattern of consumption is seen as antithetical to several publicly espoused democratic and citizen-empowering goals of contemporary culture. Whereas capitalist systems have been able to provide consumers with abundant choice at the individual level (to an extent that the notion of choice overload has become a common staple in consumer research; compare, e.g. Chernev, Böckenholt, and Goodman 2015), choice at the macro (mode of consumption) level is often very limited (Fırat and Dholakia 1977). For instance, choices regarding alternative (and potentially more sustainable) transportation modes or alternative (and potentially more participatory and meaningful) entertainment options can be quite scarce even in major cities. The question arises if (and in which ways) market-mediated access in the sharing economy (with its promise of easy, liquid access to products and services as opposed to the heaviness and inflexibility of the possession-based economy; compare Bardhi and Eckhardt 2017) can shift consumption experiences towards a more active, collectivist, public, and participatory pattern or increase choices at the mode-of-consumption level.

Throughout this section, we use three examples of crowdsourced sharing platform companies to illustrate our assessment: Tulerie, AirBnB, and BlaBlaCar. Our assessment focuses on these three companies because they allow us to capture diversity in terms of the industry they belong to (retail and consumer goods, tourism/hotel, and mobility). These three industries have been identified as key sectors in the sharing economy (PwC 2015). Further, all three platforms satisfy our inclusion criterion that supply in the sharing economy is crowdsourced rather than centralized (Eckhardt et al. 2019). Tulerie is a US-based peer-to-peer marketplace of clothing rental that allows “borrowers” to get temporary access (either 4, 10, or 20 days) to high-end clothing, shoes, and accessories (www.tulerie.com). The platform also offers a rent-to-buy option if the “lender” is willing to part with the item. AirBnB is an internationally operating peer-to-peer online platform for homestays, tourism, and similar lodging (www.airbnb.com). Finally, BlaBlaCar is a French crowdsourced online marketplace for carpooling which operates in 20 European countries as well as in India and Mexico (www.blablacar.com). Contrary to competitors such as Uber and Lyft, it specializes in car sharing trips between cities, many of them long-distance.

Because the sharing economy focuses predominantly on access-based consumption for entities where scarcity and opportunity costs are an issue, such as tangible consumption objects (e.g., cars, bicycles, clothing, living space, storage space, etc.) or services (e.g., labor), our analysis does not include the sharing of ideas, do-it-yourself instructions, and trouble-shooting guides commonly posted on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms. Excluded from our analysis is also the (usually illegal) sharing of licensed digital content, such as software, songs, and video games (compare, e.g. Giesler 2006).

Implications for Macromarketing and Avenues for Future Research: Moving Sideward or Upward?

The sharing economy represents without doubt a radical shift in how we think about ownership (Lamberton and Rose 2012). It caters to consumers’ expectations of access-based modes of consumption which provide flexibility and a “light” lifestyle (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2017). The transition from owning consumption objects to market-mediated access (Eckhardt et al. 2019) signifies the transformation from solid to liquid and from heavy to flexible forms of consumption (Bauman 2000; 2007). Building on Fırat and Dholakia’s (1982) framework of macro-consumption patterns, this essay addresses the question whether the conditions of the sharing economy may shift the passive-individual-private-alienated consumption patterns identified by Fırat and Dholakia (1998) in modernity towards a more active-collective-public-participatory consumption. Our assessment in this respect indicates that the sharing economy does not facilitate a shift towards more active-collective-public-participatory consumption patterns. Specifically, the sharing economy falls short of democratizing consumption and empowering consumers because consumption objects in the sharing economy are highly commodified and focus on exchange value rather than use value (Eckhardt and Bardhi 2015; 2016), which in turn results in low levels of human activity and social relationships as well as high levels of private consumption and consumer alienation. As Kalekin-Fishman and Langman (2015) observe, “because consumption has become commercialized, mass produced, and decreasingly subject to individuals’ control, aspirations can easily be frustrated and alienation enhanced” (p. 919).

We argue that the principal reason for the sharing economy to be unable to modify macro-level consumption patterns is that the consumption alternatives in the sharing economy remain within the boundaries of market-mediated exchange and thus fail to generate substantive higher-level consumption alternatives (compare Fırat and Dholakia 1977). For example, access-based transport platforms such as Uber, Lyft, or BlaBlaCar do not change the higher-level institutional conditions which favor cars over other modes of transportation for personal mobility. Similarly, crowdsourced fashion platforms such as Tulerie do not change societal macro-conditions regarding what represents fashion and status in society. As Fırat (1987) points out, it is not the simple availability of different brands or products that determines macro-level consumption patterns, but rather the structure of available alternatives (SAAC) on the higher level of consumption modes. Whereas consumers in industrialized societies typically have abundant choice at the lower levels of brands and products, choice at higher levels of consumption modes (e.g., the choice between using a car or public transport) is often limited and consumers often do not actively participate in the processes and rules that determine these higher-level choices, thus leading to feelings of alienation. For example, in most U.S. cities, in order to have a decent level of mobility, one must typically own (or have access) to a car. Because the highest level of choice (i.e., the consumption mode) is often predefined and very difficult to change in the short run, the sharing economy is unable to generate any significant changes in consumption patterns. That is, if by social choice the infrastructure of a city is designed in a way that moving without a car becomes very difficult, then the sharing economy can react to these conditions by providing temporary access to a car through the means of crowdsourcing, but the sharing economy cannot do anything that would substantially alter the need for a car. The same is true for other domains in the sharing economy, such as accommodation (AirBnB, couchsurfing) or fashion (Tulerie).

Figure 1 summarizes our assessment of consumption patterns in the sharing economy. Whereas the sharing economy represents a transition from solidification (i.e., ownership-based consumption) to liquidity (i.e., access-based consumption), this movement is sideways rather than vertical. That is, the sharing economy does not alter macro-level consumption patterns, which largely remain in the passive-individual-private-alienated constellation identified by Fırat and Dholakia (1982; 1998). As further shown in the Figure, active-collective-public-participatory consumption patterns can be achieved by changes that would need to go beyond those of access-based consumption and liquid modernity. Thus, a vertical shift in Figure 1 would require that the underlying assumptions of the dominant social paradigm (i.e., the basic belief structures and practices of marketplace actors as manifested in existing exchange structures) are challenged (Gollnhofer and Schouten 2017). This perspective resonates with the call for constructing new social relations able to counteract weakening social structure and widespread manifestations of loneliness and alienation through an ethical economy (Arvidsson 2008). As Chatterton and Pusey (2020) stipulate, “novel parallel social forms of production and reproduction that create non-commodified forms of social goods” (p. 31) are needed. In traditional, solidified and ownership-based modernity, a focus on use rather than on exchange value, such as the craftsmanship orientation (Felix and Fırat 2019), has been identified as a possible alternative. Within the conditions of liquid modernity, promoting institutions that facilitate true sharing (Belk 2010; 2014) and shared commitment in alternative markets (Watson and Ekici 2017) might be options able to move consumption patterns towards more active-collective-public-participatory consumption. However, our conclusions should not be interpreted as a suggestion that market-mediated economic systems need to be abandoned altogether to ameliorate the negative consequences of the modern consumption pattern for consumers. Rather, we wish to encourage future research to reflect on how non-market-mediated institutions and mechanisms could be elegantly interwoven into the organization of human lives alongside the market to insure that varied institutions balance and control each other to help realize the original democratic, liberatory, and enlightenment ideals of modern culture.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Macro-Level consumption patterns in the sharing economy.

We would also like to point out a number of challenges regarding empirical research on consumption patterns in the sharing economy, which at the same time open interesting avenues for future research. First, even though previous research has investigated reasons for consumers to participate in access-based consumption (e.g., Hamari et al. [2016] report that deriving economic benefits is a stronger motivation for participating in the sharing economy than perceived sustainability, and Möhlmann [2015] identifies users’ self-benefits such as utility, trust, and cost savings as determinants for choosing an access-based consumption option), the extant literature has not yet provided a more differentiated assessment of cultural values and belief systems related to macro-level consumption patterns in the sharing economy. For example, a recent study finds that willingness to participate in the sharing economy is higher in more collectivist and more masculine societies (Gupta et al. 2019), but further research is needed to fully understand such culture-driven consumption patterns.

It is also important to point out that consumers may actually have difficulties self-reporting their own consumption patterns. For example, Kalekin-Fishman and Langman (2015) observe that “many workers who are objectively powerless and lead fragmented lives are unaware of being alienated and even declare themselves satisfied with their lot at work” (p. 925). Actors are usually able to assess micro-level or macro-1-level phenomena (i.e., phenomena of marketing systems within which actors act and which are closer to the experiences of these actors), whereas it is much more difficult for actors to assess macro-2-level phenomena (i.e., phenomena that relate to well-being for abstract entities such as society or nature) (Haase, Becker, and Pick 2018). In a similar vein, Kadirov (2018) argues that “[i]t is expected that citizens would harbor a macromotive of belonging to and operating in meaningful marketing systems, while their phenomenological experiences of what ‘value’ is might depend on a variety of geopolitical, sociohistorical, and cultural factors” (p. 285). Thus, while it may be relatively easy for individual actors in the sharing economy to grasp the micro-level value of such systems (which often gravitates around benefits such as convenience, cost-savings, on-demand availability of services and goods, and a “lighter,” more liquid lifestyle), it becomes more difficult to assess the aggregated effects of the sharing economy on well-being at a collective, macro-level. These conditions can pose substantial challenges for the measurement of consumption patterns and may require alternative, indirect research approaches to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon.

Third, the current article addresses important implications of the sharing economy for consumer alienation, social relationships, and the trend towards individualized and passive forms of consumption. Thus, our assessment of macro-level consumption patterns in the sharing economy relates strongly to the research streams of macro-level well-being (Ganglmair-Wooliscroft and Lawson 2011; Sirgy and Lee 2006) and transformative consumer research (TCR; Figueiredo et al. 2015, Mick et al. 2012). Nevertheless, future research should investigate how macro-level consumption patterns in the sharing economy relate to the well-being of other stakeholders, such as local communities and the natural environment (e.g., Albinsson and Perera 2012; Dalpian, da Silveira, and Rossi 2015).

Finally, because the different effects within and between specific stakeholder groups are interdependent and may cause self-amplifying feedback loops, a system approach that investigates these effects jointly rather than independently (compare, e.g. Layton 2016) may constitute an interesting avenue for future research. Changes in society are often driven by disequilibria in the underlying social or economic systems, and acknowledging that system equilibria are often not stable (Felix 2003; Glaser 1985) and thus may lead to disruptive changes (such as the transition from possession to access-based consumption) may help researchers to better interpret and predict such changes. Further, marketing systems are indeed conditioned by the underlying essential infrastructure, such as social, political, and economic frameworks (Dixon 2002). Thus, the question arises as to whether and how society or policy makers can provide adequate standards to improve well-being within the sharing economy which would incentivize consumption modes that not only increase consumer well-being on a macro-level, but also improve the well-being of local communities and decrease the depletion of natural resources. Connecting back to Fırat and Dholakia’s (1982) analysis as mentioned in the beginning of this essay, we conclude that macro-level consumption patterns have not seen a disruptive change in the past 30 years, despite the purported meanings attached to the sharing economy. In fact, the sharing economy reinforces the market logic by shifting the consumption from solid to liquid rather than providing alternative modes of consumption. We hope that our analysis will stimulate future macro-level and cultural research in this area.