The Sharing Economy (SE) has been developing at an impressive pace throughout the globe and emerging as an innovative and hastily growing practice of the economy, which, on the other hand, has been attracting the attention of the scientific community. An increasing number of studies have been brought to light, particularly since 2017, helping to document and analyse how the SE has been unveiling itself and evolving across economic systems. There still is, nevertheless, a scarcity of a well-settled comprehension of the SE. This research addresses this gap by making a valuable contribution in helping to settle the sometimes-controversial, contention/dispute discourse around this arising field of knowledge over the last few years. It is composed of 3 sequential studies, whose respective research questions help find an answer to the central overall research question of the research, which is: what is the nature of the SE, and how and why stakeholders have progressively been granting legitimation to it? In conducting a historical qualitative analysis of the expression SE and its equivalents, Study 1 clarifies that (i) the SE is a phenomenon that has predominantly been formed by emergence processes, comprising social movement, similarity clustering and truce components; (ii) there is a generalised legitimacy granted to the SE by a vast number of stakeholders, even though still lacking on the consolidation of socio-political legitimation; and (iii) the nature of the SE seems to fall in a metaphorical approach, particularly, the notion of radial categories. Studies 2 and 3 represent a deeper dive into the heart of the SE sphere, with the aim to explore the role of two pivotal stakeholders, whose mutual interaction is vital for the legitimacy gaining of the SE: (a) the organisations belonging to the field and (b) the consumers. Results, respectively, show: (a) a content analysis of (1) how SBPs organisations portray themselves and express their identities to the world and (2) what is the nature of the legitimacy that is granted by external audiences to prototypical SBPs reveal that, while SBPs go through a stakeholder evaluation screening process involving the degree of their legitimacy in terms of sameness (or close substitution), distinctiveness, cognitive and socio-political, they resort to a self-presentation strategy that is based on proclaiming to be part of a global social movement and act as social agents of change concerning contemporary high-priority matters: the widespread prevalence of information technologies; the desirability of empowering people; the social cohesion as a requirement in a globalised world; and sustainability as a precondition for a more auspicious world; (b) one experiment reveals that consumers’ intention to participate in “pure sharing” and/or “pure exchange” SBPs of the SE depends on either hedonic, either gain, and/or either normative motives, hence comprising both individual and supra individual strands, to be cognitively activated in them by the stimulus given by the nature of the SBP in question. More relevantly, there is a tendency for consumers to associate both extremes of SBPs of the SE with normative, supra-individual strands, thus, allowing to elaborate that they choose to participate in SBPs due to their transformative character - it is in favour of the collective good, bringing people closer together, a more cohesive, altruistic, non-egocentric, a fairer society and, ultimately, the unlocking of new paths for better sustainability of the planet and a more auspicious future for humanity, which is something that, to the best of our knowledge, current literature did not uncover before.

--

• Economics and Business - Social Sciences