Sharing Economy Digital Platforms and Social Inclusion/Exclusion: A Research Study of Uber and Careem in Pakistan
The sharing economy business models enabled by digital platforms are shifting the landscape of economic growth and nature of employment globally. This study focuses on digital travel industry of Pakistan and aims to explore the social and economic implica
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and Zujaja Wahaj
NUST Business School, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan {fareesa.malik,zujaja.wahaj}@nbs.nust.edu.pk
Abstract. The sharing economy business models enabled by digital platforms are shifting the landscape of economic growth and nature of employment globally. This study focuses on digital travel industry of Pakistan and aims to explore the social and economic implications of sharing economy platforms. Drawing on the concepts of social inclusion/exclusion from ICT and IS literature, we examine the potential participation of digital platforms in social inclusion/exclusion of the society. We adopted an interpretive and qualitative research design. The data was collected through informal talks, observations and semi-structured interviews. For our research study, we selected two online ridehailing companies operational in Pakistan, Uber and Careem. The study shows social impacts of sharing economy digital-platforms to enhance culture of trust, family confidence and women empowerment. It highlights the inclusion of unemployed groups through self-entrepreneurship that improve economic activities in the society. The study also identifies few contradictions and potential challenges that support social exclusion due to technology, such as biased gendered contribution in economic activities, generation/age constraints in usability and accessibility issues based on geographic locations. Keywords: Sharing economy Digital platforms Social inclusion/exclusion ICT4D
Uber/Careem
1 Introduction The recent decade witnesses a massive emergence of digital platform based businesses that have become household names in short span of time, such as Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, YouTube and Upwork. These platform based digital businesses are rooted in the concept of collaborative consumption enabled by “activities of sharing, exchanging and rental of resources without owning the goods” [26, p. 143]. In management literature, different labels exist for the phenomenon of using and sharing of product and services (e.g. gig economy, collaborative consumption, peer-to- peer economy, sharing economy). The term “sharing economy”, coined in 2008, captures the whole ecosystem including economic and market arrangements related to this collaborative consumption phenomenon [26, 34, 37]. The sharing economy is defined as collaborative economy and collaborative consumption to exchange underused or unwanted assets for income © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2019 Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Nielsen and H. C. Kimaro (Eds.): ICT4D 2019, IFIP AICT 551, pp. 248–259, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18400-1_20
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generation [5]. The phenomenon of resource sharing is not new to our society. Humans are accustomed to sharing extra resources, such as room, time, vehicles, and other consumable goods with people they know (e.g. relatives, friends, and neighbours). However, the business model of “s
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