You are what you can access: Sharing and collaborative consumption online Russell Belk ⁎ York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 Canada abstract article info Article history: Accepted 1 September 2013 Available online 16 October 2013 Keywords: Collaborative consumption Ownership Access Sharing Sharing economy Community Sharing is a phenomenon as old as humankind, while collaborative consumption and the “sharing economy” are phenomena born of the Internet age. This paper compares sharing and collaborative consumption and finds that both are growing in popularity today. Examples are given and an assessment is made of the reasons for the cur- rent growth in these practices and their implications for businesses still using traditional models of sales and ownership. The old wisdom that we are what we own, may need modifying to consider forms of possession and uses that do not involve ownership. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Belk (1988) argues and theorizes that you are what you own. However with the Internet we have many ways to express our identity without ownership (Belk, 2013, in press). Consumer research bears witness to a flurry of recent attention to a group of related business and consumption practices describable as sharing (Belk, 2010), “collaborative consump- tion” (Botsman & Rogers, 2010), “the mesh” (Gansky, 2010), “commer- cial sharing systems” (Lamberton & Rose, 2012), “co-production” (Humphreys & Grayson, 2008), “co-creation” (Lanier & Schau, 2007; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), “prosumption” (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010; Toffler, 1980), “product-service systems” (Mont, 2002), “access- based consumption,” (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012), “consumer participa- tion” (Fitzsimmons, 1985), and “online volunteering” (Postigo, 2003). This attention corresponds to the rise of numerous for-profit and non- profit businesses that are flourishing thanks to the rise of the “sharing economy” (e.g., Lessig, 2008; A. Sacks, 2011). Examples of businesses that fall within one or more of these rubrics are Airbnb, Zipcar, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Freecycle, and Twitter. In a broad sense, the Internet itself is a giant pool of shared content that can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, a browser, and a government that allows access to most or all web content. There are two commonalities in these sharing and collaborative con- sumption practices: 1) their use of temporary access non-ownership models of utilizing consumer goods and services and 2) their reliance on the Internet, and especially Web 2.0, to bring this about. Web 2.0 “…refers collectively to websites that allow users to contribute content and connect with each other” (Carroll & Romano, 2011, p. 190). This is in contrast to Web 1.0 which primarily involved one-directional provision of information to consumers who did not interact or respond to the web site or to one another. In this paper I seek to assess the similarities and differences between sharing and collaborative consumption, examine the extent to which var- ious parts of the “sharing economy” truly involve sharing, and explain why these developments have stirred so much attention at this particular time. I further consider the degree to which they challenge traditional business models and the dangers and opportunities they may provide for business. For consumers, I consider how emerging ways of accessing possessions without ownership may influence our sense of self. 2. Materials and methods This review is conceptual and based on an analysis of both scholarly research on sharing and collaborative consumption and media accounts of the latest developments in these contexts. I also draw on my own prior conceptual (Belk, 2007, 2010) and empirical (Belk & Llamas, 2012) work in studying sharing. I focus primarily on contemporary sharing activity, although the analysis is grounded in an historical and cultural appreciation of the basic practice of sharing. 3. Theory Rather than a precise definition of sharing, Belk (2010) suggests contrasting the prototypes of sharing (mothering and the pooling and allocation of household resources) with the prototypes of gift giving Journal of Business Research 67 (2014) 1595–1600 ⁎ Tel.: +1 905 596 0079. E-mail address: rbelk@schulich.yorku.CA. 0148-2963/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.001 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Business Research