Juliet Schor - After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back

The research team and I have incurred many debts in the almost ten years since we began this project. First and foremost we would like to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which generously supported our research through the Connected Learning Research Network. We are deeply grateful to the convener, Mizuko Ito, and to our colleagues in the networkJean Rhodes, Sonia Livingstone, Craig Watkins, Dalton Conley, William Penuel, Kris Gutierrez, Vera Michalchik, Katie Salen Tekinba, Amanda Wortman, Julian Sefton-Green, Richard Arum, Kylie Peppler, Ben Kirschner, and Nichole Pinkhard. They provided years of intellectual engagement, suggestions for our research, and friendship. From the Foundation, we thank Connie Yowell, Julia Stasch, and Jennifer Humke. At Irvine, Courtney Santos and Anita Centeno were always helpful. For me, the network was an entre into the study of digital technology and social life that has been enormously stimulating.

At Boston College, our work has been graciously supported by department chairs Sarah Babb and Andrew Jorgenson, Dean Gregory Kalscheur, and Provost David Quigley. I am grateful to them, as well as to my colleagues in the sociology department and the grants office. I would also like to thank the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, where I had the privilege of being a fellow in 201415. It was a highly productive year, and we had a great cohort. I enjoyed being back at Harvard and am especially grateful for the opportunity to spend time with Judith Vichniac, the fellowship director, and an old friend.

The team benefited from the work of many undergraduates, some of whom took on important parts of the research, including interviewing and coding. We would like to thank Abigail Letak, Alison Wawrzynek, Alex Moscovitz, Lea Oriol, Hahnsol Kang, Elizabeth Jiang, Nathan Schwan, Carolyn Ruh, Cristina Zubizaretta, Alison Grewe, Gloria Kostadinova, John Deacon, Sergio Farina, and Michael Griglak. Your contributions were invaluable.

Because this is a new area of study, I have had the privilege of being at a number of early scholarly gatherings. At each of these I met scholars whose research I already admired, and I was introduced to new people and their work. One of these workshops was the First International Workshop on the Sharing Economy organized by Koen Frenken at Utrecht University in 2015. In 2016 Kathleen Thelen and Peter Hall organized a Radcliffe Ventures meeting on the Politics of Work and Welfare in the Platform Economy, which significantly expanded my understanding of the sector. A third was the Sharing Cities Summit in Barcelona. Most recently, it has been a privilege to participate in the Political Economy and Justice Workshop at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, organized by Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, and Rebecca Henderson. Many thanks to all the participants in those gatherings.

I have presented this research to colleagues at many universities and conferences, where I received valuable feedback and encouragement. I am grateful to participants in seminars and workshops at Harvard, Harvard Business School, the Berkman Center, MIT, Northwestern, Boston College, Bentley University, Microsoft Research, Berkeley, Barnard College, New York University, Michigan, Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Boston University, CUNY Graduate Center, Connecticut College, University of Toronto, University of Massachusetts, Northeastern University, New School for Social Research, University of Maine, University of Central Arkansas, Tellus Institute, Utrecht University, Hamburg University, and University of Paris-Dauphine. I also presented our work at a variety of institutions and conferences, including the Annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the American Anthropological Association, and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. I presented to the National Economic Council of the White House, the European Commission in Brussels, a joint workshop of the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Division of Consumer Economics of the Federal Reserve Board, the Inaugural US conference of CoreEcon, the Institute for Work and the Economy, the Environmental Law Institute, the New Economy Coalition, the Digital Media and Learning Conference, the Sharing Cities Summit, the ReShaping Work Conference, the Womens Forum, the National Institute for Public Policy Analysis (Italy), the Feltrinelli Foundation, the Milan EXPO2015, and the OIKOS Think Tank in Antwerp. I presented at the SHARE conference which I discuss at the end of chapter 1. I was hosted by the Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid for a week in 2017.