Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Technological Forecasting & Social Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/techfore Capturing the dynamics of the sharing economy: Institutional research on the plural forms and practices of sharing economy organizations Johanna Mair, Georg Reischauer ⁎ Hertie School of Governance, Friedrichstrasse 180, 10117 Berlin, Germany ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Sharing economy Market Organizational form Organizational practice Institutional logics Institutional work ABSTRACT To date, management research has paid little attention to dynamics of the sharing economy: how markets for sharing resources emerge and change, and the intended and unintended consequences of resource sharing. We propose a definition of the sharing economy that brings the role of organizations as infrastructure providers to the fore and helps us to assess the culturally rooted pluralism of forms and practices in these organizations. We introduce two perspectives in research on organizational institutionalism that focus on culture and pluralism – institutional complexity and institutional work – and argue that unpacking the pluralism of organizational forms and practices is critical to examine the dynamics of the sharing economy. We propose an agenda for research to capture the dynamics of the sharing economy at the organizational, field, and inter-field level. Such an agenda helps to document and analyze how the sharing economy manifests and evolves across various economic systems and has the potential to refine and recast existing management theory. 1. Introduction The sharing economy has attracted considerable public and scho- larly attention. Current debates underscore that it has set economic and socially relevant dynamics in motion, altering existing markets. For example, the ride-sharing market, led by Uber and Lyft, has changed the taxi market. The sharing economy may also lead to new markets, such as the home-sharing market that Airbnb pioneered (Belk, 2014; Matzler et al., 2015; Sundararajan, 2016). Besides producing possible positive effects (Kostakis and Bauwens, 2014), the sharing economy calls into question established ways of organizing labor and commercializes personal life (Martin, 2016). Analytically, these dynamics involve processes of market change (Meyer et al., 2005) and of market emergence (Fligstein, 2013), as well as intended and unintended consequences (Merton, 1936). In particular, the unintended conse- quences are drawing increasing interest from policy makers. So far, empirical studies have not addressed these dynamics of the sharing economy explicitly. They have instead focused on aspects such as the antecedents of sharing and motivations for it (Bucher et al., 2016; Hellwig et al., 2015; Lamberton and Rose, 2012; Möhlmann, 2015; Piscicelli et al., 2015), competition (Cusumano, 2014), and the governance of users (Hartl et al., 2016; Scaraboto, 2015). These efforts have been particularly helpful for understanding the business models of organizations in the sharing economy (sharing economy organizations for short). These organizations operate a digital platform that allow individuals to share resources. We believe that studying sharing economy organizations, and more specifically the culturally rooted pluralism of their forms and practices which reflect their embeddedness in varying cultural contexts, is critical for understanding the dynamics of the sharing economy: market change, market emergence, and intended and unintended consequences. Culture, understood as taken-for-granted sets of meanings and rules, is important for explaining economic outcomes and processes in various economic systems (Amable, 2003; Hall and Soskice, 2001). It shapes how organizations act and react (Beckert, 2010; Dequech, 2003; Zukin and DiMaggio, 1990). In the sharing economy, culture seems to affect the choice of organizational forms and to account for the pluralism of sharing economy organizations. For example, organizations in Germany seem to differ from those in the U.S. regarding the orientation – for- profit vs. not-for-profit – they adopt (Schor and Fitzmaurice, 2015) and regarding how they organize – the structures and systems they adopt. In the U.S., the dominant structure of sharing economy organizations seems to be similar to that of organizations in the “traditional” economy (Schor and Fitzmaurice, 2015), whereas in Germany alternative ways of organizing are common (Oberg et al., 2017). Besides a pluralism of organizational forms, a pluralism of practices of sharing economy organizations appears in our empirical research (Reischauer and Mair, 2017). Organizations seem to vary greatly regarding how they interface with nonmarket actors such as city governments or interest groups (Baron, 1995) and how they govern http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.05.023 Received 19 July 2016; Received in revised form 2 May 2017; Accepted 22 May 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mair@hertie-school.org (J. Mair), reischauer@hertie-school.org (G. Reischauer). Technological Forecasting & Social Change xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0040-1625/ © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Mair, J., Technological Forecasting & Social Change (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.05.023