Sharing and the disintegration of value creation

The Sharing Economy has predominantly been described as something inherently good and tightly coupled with new patterns of consumption rather than production. In this respect, there has been an empirical bias that involves not studying incumbent industrial actors’ adoption of sharing mechanisms as a means for externalized operations. This paper explores how incumbent technology firms utilize sharing economy mechanisms in their pursuit of growth-related advantage. In addition to this, the paper discusses the implications that the adoption of sharing economy mechanisms may have for both business and society. According to the findings, firms display a disintegration of value creation practice through the utilization of sharing economy mechanisms, which in turn may threaten the basis for market formalism through the increased reliance of service bartering as a mechanism of production. Albeit currently a marginal phenomenon, we expect continued adoption of sharing economy mechanisms by incumbent actors to produce new challenges for the society