Sharing economies? Theories, practices and impacts

Participation in so-called ‘sharing economies’ has been reinvigorated by the enabling features of accessible, smart and mobile ICT technologies. This socio-technical enabler is working in combination with the constraining impacts of economic austerity, worker precarity and increasing awareness of resource constraints. Media attention meanwhile has been attracted to the rapid rise of a few high-profile sharing companies and the seemingly endless new opportunities to reconfigure the ways in which goods, skills and experiences are circulated.