Marketing

Agriculture

World Wide Web

Ecology

Netnography

Biology

The Internet

Economics

Market economy

Computer science

Business

Emerging markets

Social media

Political science

Citizen journalism

Social capital

Sociology

Data science

Barter

Finance

Subsistence agriculture

Renting

Disruptive innovation

Sharing economy

Social science

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)

Over the last decade, the sharing economy that covers systems of organised sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping among communities of peers on Internet platforms has emerged as a major disruptive pattern in capitalist economies (Botsman and Rogers, 2010). Prior research on the sharing economy has mainly concentrated on young, well-educated urban users and therefore particularly underlined noble motivations for participation, such as hedonic, environmental, and political reasons. This research looks beyond this hipster view of sharing entrepreneurs and focuses on French deprived mothers who use peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms to survive. Drawing on the literature on subsistence markets in developing countries (e.g., Viswanathan et al., 2014), it investigates Facebook buy-and-sell groups as a new form of subsistence markets in developed countries. Using a multi-method approach involving in-depth interviews, netnography, and participatory observation on Facebook buy-and-sell groups, it more particularly explores how Facebook specific digital features participate in these emerging markets. The findings indicate that subsistence markets' emergence in developed countries on Facebook is founded on new digital features that (re)create structural, cognitive and relational forms of social capital. This research thus offers interesting contributions and implications for public policy makers engaged in the regulation of the sharing economy.

How Facebook digital features contribute to the re-emergence of subsistence markets in developed countries