‘Green logic’ and the Sharing Economy

The green potential of the sharing economy to exploit underutilised and redundant resources has generated considerable interest and expectations on the part of government institutions, investors and consumers. Alongside the emerging green logic, more established economic and social logics appear to be critical for growth of sharing platforms. Applying an institutional logics approach, this paper argues that it is a key challenge for entrepreneurial teams in the sharing economy to deal with this complexity of expectations of various institutions and players. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews with founders and executives of UK sharing platforms, we examine the strategies used by entrepreneurial teams to utilise and combine the green logic with competing logics. We develop a typology of multiple logics configurations, and the results reveal strategies pursued by platform entrepreneurial teams to accommodate the green logic in the context of the institutional logics complexity. The results show how shari...