The multiple logics of market-based governance: How the sharing economy platform Airbnb governs user conduct

Abstract

Building upon the rich tradition of research on governmentality, this paper introduces the notion of market-based governance (i.e. the coordinated efforts of companies to align the conduct of its constituents with the institutional norms, values and interests of the company), and presents an empirical investigation of market-based governance in the context of a sharing economy platform, Airbnb. Whereas existing governmentality research has focused on specific discourses or aspects of governance in the marketplace, our aim is to develop broader-spectrum conceptual tools for ‘ordering’ the increasingly multifaceted forms of marked-based governance. We show that Airbnb mobilizes three distinct logics of governance (i.e. the regulatory, competitive and communitarian) which subsume diverse modes of power (i.e. the sovereign, disciplinary and pastoral) that contribute to the cultivation of governable subjects (i.e. the compliant subject, entrepreneurial subject and community member). The theoretical framework developed in this work is applied to critically reflect on emergent forms of market-based governance, the dilemmas of multi-logic governance and the uneven geographies of market-based governance.