Bachelor Thesis

The Sharing Economy´s Public Value
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An Investigation of the Domains where Value Creation and Destruction takes shape

Wanja Amling

Liberal Arts and Sciences
Tilburg University
Thesis Advisor: Prof. Niels Noorderhaven
Submitted July 10th 2015 Abstract
Recent economic and societal trends, in connection with technological advances have given rise to the exponential growth of the sharing economy, a twenty-first century socio-economic model based on the sharing of goods and services via peer-to-peer market places. The sharing movement receives a considerable amount of attention, especially from the media, and is starting to play an increasingly important role in economic and social realities. This role, however,
The 1970s experienced a fortification of customer-centricity from the side of organizations and a corporate orientation in the direction of customer value, reinforcing the customer´s needs as the focal point of businesses. Followed by an increase of the shareholder value concept around the 1980s, which placed main emphasis on financial and economic performances of businesses in form of a dynamic investment calculation (Rappaport, 1986). As a reaction and backlash to this concept, came about a shift towards stakeholder value, reinforcing the notion that corporations ought to detect stakeholder groups and meet their interests (Freeman, 1984). The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) would follow soon after and promote the idea that private corporations too should be hold responsible for their economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic impact for the public (Carroll,
63). For that the study of communication documents of sharing businesses depicts an additional means to capture possible public values of the sharing economy. Published statements attempt to express the businesses assumed legitimization of their existence and commonly entail the public value of an organization. As individual businesses make up the sharing economy, their proclaimed statements illustrate an adequate source of possible public values. Nonetheless, the assessment of mission,- value,- and vision statements does not necessarily inform us about the actual value as it is perceived by the public, but tells us about the intended value creation of a sharing business, which can but does not need to be recognized by the person - rendering interviews as the primary source of this