Flattening Relations in the Sharing Economy

Abstract

The sharing economy (SE) includes economic, social, and technological arrangements to promote collaborative relations between users and providers willing to share assets through digital platforms (DP). Even evolving fast, there is an opportunity to discuss how DP establishes connections between users and providers and uses a digital agency to mediate and flatten consumption relations in SE. Therefore, the authors propose a framework and future research directions that explore characteristics of the actants (roles, agency, behavioral attitudes) in the process of flattening consumption relations through DP in SE (connections, mediation, induction). To structure this framework, the authors consolidated the various definitions of its main elements and adopted the actor-network theory concept of translation as the theoretical-methodological approach to analyze the associations that determined how flattening consumption relations occur in SE.