Introduction : sharing

The articles in this volume speak to contemporary debates on the significance and increasing turn to practices such as sharing. We start with work on notions of sharing, especially Belk (2010), before addressing recent work on the shift to collaborative consumption. Consumer Culture Theory has foregrounded notions of community and we explore the links to this concept in section three, which also embraces the shift to Web 2.0 and its participatory and sharing imperatives. Sharing also brings in its wake tensions and contradictions and we attend to these in the final sections. We believe that the papers in this volume demonstrate the value of exploring sharing as a possible avenue to advance consumer research