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Sharing Economy, Sharing Responsibility? Corporate Social Responsibility in the Digital Age

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Abstract

The sharing economy has transformed economic transactions, created new organizational forms, and contributed to changes in consumer culture. Started as a movement with promises of a more sustainable, democratic, and inclusive economy, the sharing economy, and its impact on issues such as privacy, discrimination, worker rights, and regulation, is now the subject of heated debate. Many of these issues root in the changes that digital technologies have brought and the unresolved moral and ethical questions emerging therefrom. This special issue contributes to this ongoing debate with five articles that develop theoretical frameworks and conduct empirical investigations, providing fine-grained analyses of urgent issues in the sharing economy. In this article, we highlight these and other issues that we believe deserve further attention from business ethics scholarship.

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Acknowledgements

This special issue was financially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation project Ps2Share: Participation, Privacy, and Power in the Sharing Economy under Grant Agreement No. 732117 and Norges Forskningsråd and their Fair Labor in the Digital Economy project (Grant Number 247725/O70).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Michael Etter

  2. The Nordic Centre for Internet and Society, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway

    Christian Fieseler

  3. York University, Toronto, Canada

    Glen Whelan

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  1. Michael Etter
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  2. Christian Fieseler
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Correspondence to Michael Etter.

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Etter, M., Fieseler, C. & Whelan, G. Sharing Economy, Sharing Responsibility? Corporate Social Responsibility in the Digital Age. J Bus Ethics 159, 935–942 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04212-w

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