On Thursday, the 25th of March 2021, Genea Canelles will defend her PhD dissertation, entitled: Sharing Economy: A New Urban Challenge, Analyzing the Governance and Legitimization Dynamics of a Disruptive Sector.
Due to the Covid-19 measures, this defence will take place online. The link to attend the event will be shared a few days in advance.
In her thesis Genea describes how sharing economy has emerged as a disruptive phenomenon impacting different sectors like transport, energy and accommodation. Sharing economy covers digital platforms and offline activities like Airbnb and smaller initiatives such as repair collectives and tool libraries. For these activities, cities represent the most suitable laboratory to spread, due to their role in enhancing technological, economic and social innovation.
This phenomenon has been hailed as a source of innovation. At the same time, it has been extensively criticized for its business evolution and uncompetitive behaviour, raising doubts regarding its negative or positive effects. Also, issues related to the platform’s data have created tensions with local authorities called to preserve the public interest against these tech giants. On the one hand, all the above-mentioned harmful elements had directly affected the legitimization of organizations like Airbnb. On the other hand, this tension has requested a reevaluation of the governance frameworks to deal with a disruptive sector. Therefore, organizations like Airbnb have been trying to reach sector legitimization by participating and influencing the local governance dynamics.
Based on these elements, Genea's thesis provides an analysis of sector legitimization and governance while investigating how these two processes connect in time. In a retrospective and longitudinal way, the study also shows the events, actors and strategies that have affected the sector legitimacy and its interrelationship with certain governance frameworks. The research shows that these two processes do present interrelationship capacity through the use of a comparative qualitative case study.
Join Genea's defence to hear more about her research.
