Learning to Share: Pedagogy, Open Learning, and the Sharing Economy

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 24. Technology and Education

Abstract

The sharing economy is fertile sociological ground for studying important themes like labor, exchange, consumption, and inequality, as well as larger political-economic trends that are reflective of this post-recession era. The multi-faceted research agenda of the sharing economy can teach about many themes relevant to sociologists, but what does the sharing economy teach to those who participate in it? What is learned from the sharing economy and how do participants learn it? In this paper, I explore the pedagogic elements of one case study within the sharing economy: open learning. Drawing from 51 interviews with 34 participants and roughly 300 hours of participant observation, I use Bernstein’s (1996) theory of pedagogic discourse to ask how open learners learn to share. I argue that an ethos of communalism and cooperativism dominated moral discourse for learners and regulated social order. Entrepreneurialism was learned through a flexible sociality, where participants contributed to each other’s learning as a means of validating and legitimizing that learning. The need to contribute or give back was taken for granted by participants, who felt compelled to give their own expertise or labor to the commons after taking something from it. This study depicts a tension between a neoliberal entrepreneurial frame and a communalist, cooperativist frame that is also present within the larger sharing economy. In the larger sharing economy, I suggest that a similar pedagogic approach that asks how participants learn to share could be developed in order to better understand learning and economic relations as two sides of the same coin in contemporary capitalism.

Author

• Lindsey Carfagna, Thomas Edison State University