Hosting on Airbnb: Navigating a Collaborative Economy

Mathilde Dissing Christensen

doi:10.17918/xtff-pa19

The dissertation "Hosting on Airbnb: Navigating a Collaborative Economy" investigates how Airbnb hosts experience and perform hosting, and how such performances produce novel economic constellations. Although digital platforms are rapidly transforming existing industries, little academic attention has been devoted to exploring the new category of workers navigating such collaborative economies. This dissertation argues that Airbnb specifically, and peer-to-peer platforms in general, represent the development of a novel economic constellation by transgressing existing categories of commercial, private, and cultural realms. Through 33 qualitative interviews with active hosts in Copenhagen and Philadelphia, this dissertation answers the question: How do Airbnb hosts negotiate commercial, private and cultural spheres through their hosting performances? To do so, the dissertation analyzes the diversity of relations and entanglements informing different performances of hospitality: how hosts navigate privacy and hospitality, how they navigate socio-institutional frameworks and community relations, and how online performances on the Airbnb platform serve to shape and stabilize its market. Airbnb can be seen as a model for thinking about a fluid form of work and a mobile lifestyle, reaching beyond the travels of individuals by exploring how moorings, local communities, and touristic landscapes are changed through an increased blending be-tween commercial and private realms. Leaning on a performative framework this dissertation analyzes economic forms as per-formatively produced, rather than having an independent reality. This brings attention to how performances of Airbnb hosts are changing economic constellations and what is perceived to be economic by challenging existing demarcations of the economic, the cultural and the political. Hospitality performances of Airbnb hosts entail continuous transgression of previously established boundaries between private and commercial. This is so emblematic of Airbnb that it provides a more productive way of understanding the phenomenon than the idea of economic "disruption" often attributed to novel economic forms. Consequently, the novelty of peer-to-peer hospitality lies in the new adaptations and reconfigurations of performance and transgressions of previously established categories. The dissertation notes that treating the "collaborative economy" and the agents navigating it as a uniform group is too simplistic an understanding of the phenomenon, as multiple distinct modes of hospitality are produced through host performances. This research makes a unique contribution to the understanding of the emerging phenomenon of Airbnb, and provides insight into how economic forms are produced, de-stabilized and re-stabilized through performances of users, continuously negotiated with respect to economic, cultural and emotional considerations and motivations. Additionally, this dissertation contributes to studies of the contemporary uses and cultures of information technology by demonstrating how technology becomes entangled and meaningful in everyday life. The conclusions of this dissertation ought not to be seen as solely of academic relevance; rather they feed directly into ongoing debates in multiple cities around the world. As legislative challenges occur at the intersection between the multinational platform of Airbnb and local legislative landscapes, there is likely no legislative model to fit all localities. Rather, legislative frameworks should be considered in terms of existing local conditions and the composition of modes of hospitality within those contexts.

Hosting on Airbnb: Navigating a Collaborative Economy

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Hosting on Airbnb: Navigating a Collaborative Economy

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