Collective action towards social transformation through sharing commons: Case study of a sharing economy project in Hong Kong

Abstract

Coping with environmental problems towards sustainability is an important bottom line of social entrepreneurship (Dart, 2004; Santos, 2012). In recent years, sharing economy has been identified as an innovative mission-driven economic model with high optimism in coping with hyper-consumption and environmental problems (Heinrichs, 2013). While both have similarities in mission-driven towards environmental problems, and the belief of social entrepreneurship can adopt sharing economy as the new business models tackling hyper-consumption (Roh, 2016), sharing economy is more on peer-to-peer with collective action through commons rather than the dominant heroic reification of social entrepreneurs (Defourny & Nyssens, 2010; Hamari, Sjöklint, & Ukkonen, 2016). It is, however, little studies have been focused on how collective action in sharing economy reaches social transformation, while most of them are still in business perspective.

This paper, by adopting the meso level of van Wijk, Zietsma, Dorado, de Bakker, and Martí (2018) three-cycle model of social innovation, investigates the way how actors in sharing economy project co-create their shared interest on collective action through the interactive spaces of negotiation, and the potential issue of this collective action in practice. Case study was adopted in this paper. In this paper, as sharing economy is rarely studied in Hong Kong, the adoption of case study is essential to provide an initial start to the under-studied phenomenon (Ashley, 2017). Waste-no-mall (Yuen Long) was selected as a typical case. In this case study, a total number of 10 in-depth interviews with founders, active and inactive participants were conducted to ensure the variety of participants through both purposive sampling and snowball sampling.

This study argues the collective action in Waste-no-mall is established by the shared vision in environmental protection and the shared principle of ‘self-determination’ through ‘spaces of negotiation’ in both free physical space of operation and the relational space of Whatsapp group. Through this paramount idea of self-determination, these spaces have become the open spaces for all to discuss, to propose their own idea, or to decide making by everyone without clear rules, top down bureaucracy and proper management. It facilitates the consensus decision making instead of a top-down or democratic governance while people may have flexibility in doing their own work in the project under the same realm of environmental protection without much regulation. They become ‘comrades’ (as a kind of collective entrepreneurship) and work towards the vision together.

Though the co-creation of self-determination and the collective action in Waste-no-mall, it has successfully attracted a group of like-minded people together. It has, however, also posited the difficulties in embedding their idea to the institutional context, especially obtaining support from general public. The failure of creating ‘herding spaces’ to connect the project to the institutional context, also made them hard to get people support in advocating policy, especially in manipulating the national mood for agenda setting, which is hard to curb hyper-consumption in structural and macro-level.

In conclusion, this paper argues the double-edged sword of both importance and potential issues of spaces of negotiation in facilitating the collective action in sharing economy. This paper is important to link the discussion of collective action with spaces of negotiation to sharing economy within the SE context in solving social problems. Such action, however, should not be seen positively as take-for-granted. It can further enhance the audiences’ insight on the dynamics of collective action in alternative movements under SE context.