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Work and Prosumerism: Collaborative Consumption in the United States

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Part of the book series: Dynamics of Virtual Work ((DVW))

Abstract

Thanks to a growing network of e-trading platforms and peer-to-peer websites, sharing a car on Zipcar, renting somebody’s room for a couple of nights on Airbnb, or lending money on Lending Club have become increasingly popular ways to access goods, services, and information. Known as “collaborative consumption” or the “sharing economy”, this trend is usually presented in the media and in the management literature (Botsman & Roo, 2010; Gansky, 2010) as a wonderfully efficient reengineered consumption model in which communities of digitally savvy users, acting both as producers and consumers — or “prosumers” — interact to share, exchange, barter, swap, or rent goods and services online.

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© 2015 Marie-Christine Pauwels

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Pauwels, MC. (2015). Work and Prosumerism: Collaborative Consumption in the United States. In: Frayssé, O., O’Neil, M. (eds) Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137473905_5

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