12.05.15 23:42Sustaining hierarchy – Uber isn’t sharing | King's Review – Magazine

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Francesca Pick and Julia Dreher, May 5th

Sustaining hierarchy – Uber isn’t sharing

It’s been a long night, you’re at a pub, and you want nothing more than to get home quickly. Finding a cabthis late at night in London is nearly impossible, but luckily you have the Uber app on your phone and canorder a car right to the pub’s doorstep without leaving the comfort of your seat. You quickly choose betweenUber Black or Uber X (the cheaper version of the Uber black car service that runs with “drivers like you andme”), tap the “request car” button, and you’re ready to go. Two minutes later a black Renault driven by ayoung man in his 30s pulls up. You will not even have to talk with him to pay the bill because the app takescare of that for you.

Uber, the on-demand taxi app, has been a hot topic in the media over the past months. From the regulatory

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issues and bans the company has recently faced in various European cities to growing criticisms of itsaggressive expansion strategies and sales tactics, to protests being staged by its drivers, Uber is capturing thepublic’s attention. Interestingly, The Guardian, Time, Salon, der Spiegel and many other prominent mediasources participating in the discussion surrounding Uber have been describing the company as one of the keyrepresentatives of the so-called “sharing economy.” This is an unfortunate misnomer.

The sharing economy is a relatively recent phenomenon that experts and academics are still trying toarticulate. The term is intended to capture new, more collaborative forms of creation, production,distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services that are being enabled by new technologicalplatforms. By focusing on Uber as the representative of “the sharing economy,” we risk confusing thepublic’s understanding of the sharing economy and overlooking many revolutionary enterprises that betterexemplify an ethos of actual sharing.

Let’s start with the basics: one of the underlying tenets of the sharing economy is that technology shouldenable us to use our resources more efficiently by replacing the ownership of goods with access. As RachelBotsman describes in her 2010 book What’s mine is yours, new apps and online platforms can unlock the“idling capacity” of houses, cars and utilities by matching people’s haves with other people’s wants. Suchtechnologies, she argues, will help reduce overall consumption and represent an important step towardsmore sustainable lifestyles.

Ride-sharing is a good example of a ‘true’ sharing economy: people driving from A to B can harness the“idling capacity” of their cars by filling their seats and splitting the cost of gas with travellers going to thesame destination. Uber and its competitors such as Lyft or Wundercar are particularly fond of describingthemselves as real-time or on-demand ride-sharing apps. According to Wundercar’s website, the app helpsyou to “spontaneously find someone to give you a lift.” Likewise, Lyft drivers are described as “your friendwith a car”.

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Referring to these apps as “ride-sharing” services, however, is deceiving. Their drivers don’t happen to beriding through town and spontaneously decide to give somebody a ride. They are semi-professional orprivate individuals looking to top up their paychecks, working as informal taxi drivers. Since they are on theroad because of the app, we cannot speak of “idling capacity” here. Nothing is actually being shared. For thisreason, the French government recently issued Uber a !100 000 fine for mis-labeling themselves a “car-sharing” service when in fact they are a private transportation company.

But the absence of any real sense of sharing runs deeper. As a brand, Uber promotes a lifestyle that is hardlyegalitarian, communitarian or conservationist: their website features images of young, well-dressed,successful-looking people that invoke an air of luxury, materialism and elitism. What’s more, recent storiesin the media document Uber’s “workers’” lack of rights and the company’s unscrupulous sales tactics. Atthe end of the day, Uber, for all its hype, is hardly a departure from the individualism and precariousness ofother capitalist enterprises.

There is no doubt that Uber is disrupting an industry that is dominated by cartels and local monopolies. Noris there any question that it is offering an impeccable service for which there is a large market. In this, Uberat least opens the door to begin imagining a different configuration of urban transportation services. ButUber is still perfectly in line with our current economic system. This is both its strength and weakness. Thefact that it is only marginally different from that which already exists makes it much easier for it to beadopted by the mainstream. But this robs it of any ability to remedy the economic, social and environmentalproblems that our current system faces. As recent criticisms have pointed out, Uber is in fact exacerbatingmany of those same problems.

So if companies like Uber provide a misleading and negative image of “the sharing economy,” what mightthe true sharing economy look like?

The real sharing

Platforms like Uber are built on top of venture-capital-backed, hierarchically structured organizations.These platforms may enable people to share their resources, skills, and time, as well as to finance andproduce their goods in mildly more collaborative ways. However, at the end of the day, they facilitate little

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more than a transactional form of “sharing” not much different than that of conventional capitalistexchange. While the pretense of “sharing” colors the front end of the services they offer, rarely does an ethosof collaboration permeate their actual organizational structure.

Uber is a classical Weberian hierarchy, based on a vertical, linear understanding of superiority andsubordination. The higher one climbs up the ladder, the more influence and power one gains. At thebottom of the company are the drivers who lack employment protection, have no official wage, and no sayover their rights. Above the drivers are the founders and management who set the rules and aims of theorganization and impose their decisions on the drivers. Above them are the shareholders who provide capitalfor the organization and force it to maximize the values of the shares through increased profits. Withprofit-maximisation as their ultimate, operative logic, companies like Uber, Lyft, and many others claimingto be a part of the sharing economy invariably favor efficiency over social impact, output over outcome.Such organizations put more emphasis on the question of “how” they can produce something (i.e. tomaximize profit) instead of “what” they are producing (i.e. the quality of their product and its social andenvironmental impact).

Instead of transforming only the “front end” of the transactions and services that they offer, companies canimplement the principles of sharing and collaboration in the “back end” of their enterprises. They canstructure themselves in ways that distributes power and profit in less-hierarchical ways. Companies that arefully collaborative—that is, organizations that are collaborative at both front and back ends—betterexemplify the ‘true’ sharing economy. Such companies are characterized by a heterarchical organizationalstructure.

“Heterarchy” has long been used to describe non-hierarchical or networked forms of organisation markedby flexible, horizontal structures that create greater opportunities for cooperation among actors withinthem. It fosters the emergence of diverse social relations. Different actors can communicate on the same levelin such a way that enables anyone to take on greater or lesser responsibility according to their differingdegrees of motivation, expertise, etc. The creation of such horizontal, flexible cross-connections leads to therecombination and creation of knowledge and often results in increased innovation and increased resilience.Unlike hierarchies, where encounters are foreseeable due to rigid and defined structures, heterarchies enablethe emergence of and are able to cope with complexity and contingent, non-planned events.

The term heterarchy was first coined by Warren McCulloch in 1945 as a way to describe the general modelingof networks in relation to his work on central nervous systems and cybernetics. Heterarchies promote theemergence of rhizomatic structures as described by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and FelixGuatarri. In a rhizomatic network structure, a higher number of diverse relations are enabled through thepossibility of complex interconnections that go beyond the hierarchical modalities of superiority andsubordination. ”The rhizome is a system of shortcuts and detours and is a place for ‘unforeseen encounters’.Within the rhizome, linear causality is replaced by a chain of contingencies.”

Neal Gorenflo, founder of Shareable, the non-profit news hub on the sharing economy, points to the fact thatheterarchical organizations encourage and embrace a kind of sharing that is transformational rather thanthe merely transactional. For Gorenflo, such heterarchical organizations need not neglect considerations ofoutput and efficiency, but in the process they prioritize distributing power relations and creating socialimpact.

A particularly good example of a heterarchical organization is OuiShare. OuiShare is an international

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community, a think-and-do-tank whose mission is to build and nurture a collaborative society. OuiShare’smain activities are community building, incubating projects and offering support to individuals andorganizations through professional services and education. Examples of OuiShare projects include OuiShareFest, a 3-day festival about the Collaborative Economy; POC21, a 5 week accelerator program for thedevelopment of open source, sustainable products; and Sharitories, a tool kit for cities and regions wishing toimplement collaborative programs such as bike and car-sharing schemes.

The OuiShare community has a core team that consists of a several dozen people who run the organizationon a daily basis, but the whole network is comprised of over 1000 volunteer ‘members’ whose participationwithin OuiShare is based mainly on their own ostensibly altruistic motives. The most important group ofhighly engaged members are called ‘Connectors’; they serve as highly active nodes in the network whoanimate and coordinate local communities and projects. As a “do-cracy”, OuiShare allows anyone with astrong interest and high motivation to take on greater responsibility and participate in decision-makingprocesses or lead projects. Positions with high responsibilities are not static but change over time. Thisflexible structure enables OuiShare to open up a wider range of possibilities for participation within thenetwork. Control and decision making processes are dealt with in a collaborative way, enabling thestrengthening and building of a commons and social capital, fostering communities, relationships anddeveloping resilience.

Some critics have argued that the sharing economy can only ever be parasitic to capitalism because thosewho do not already have private property to share are by default excluded from it. Such arguments arepremised on a narrow understanding of “sharing” limited to the direct exchange of goods or services ofequal value. Platforms like Couchsurfing call into question such criticisms and allow us to think aboutsharing in a broader sense. Couchsurfing is the perfect example of a rhizomatic structure that allows users tomove beyond a traditional, transactional mode of sharing. On Couchsurfing you can “surf” a couch even ifyou don’t have one to offer. If you can’t host, you might still offer your time to show someone around who isvisiting your town. Collaboration is based on a much broader sense of exchange, tied more to notions ofredistribution. Those who can offer something, offer it. Those who are in need can accept that offer but thatdoesn’t mean that they are obliged to give back something of the same value to the same person.Collaboration is distributed across the network and follows a rather circular logic. If you don’t have the samegoods to offer back, you might offer something else to someone else. Eventually what goes around comesaround and everyone is satisfied. This circular logic is essential to rhizomatic structures. Deleuze and

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Guatarri describe the network as a system of shortcuts and detours, which is what we can observe withCouchsurfing: rather than a “straight and direct” exchange of goods of the same value, we can see horizontalinteractions between different participants of the network.

Numerous other examples of heterarchical organizations abound. CoWheels Car Club is a car sharingplatform in the UK that runs as a not-for-profit social enterprise, where all surplus generated is reinvestedback into the organisation to help fulfill its social mission of reducing car ownership and its negative effectson the environment. An example that takes collaboration one step further is Loconomics, a local peer-to-peer service marketplace from San Francisco, which is cooperatively owned by the freelancers who providethe services on the platform. A similar model is implemented by Guerrilla Translation, a P2P translationcollective and cooperative from Spain that offers the same services as a translation agency.

Fairmondo, a German startup, offers a slightly different approach to participating in “the sharing economy”.Fairmondo is an Amazon-like online marketplace, owned and governed by its users, who are also itsshareholders. An even more extreme example of such a distributed marketplace is the decentralizedtransportation system known as La Zooz. La Zooz eliminates ownership of the platform altogether by usingan algorithm that runs by itself on the servers of each individual participant of the network. By running onthe “Blockchain” (the technology underlying Bitcoin), La Zooz is able to operate as a decentralized,

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Francesca Pick is developing the non-profit OuiShare and is chair of the collaborative economy conference OuiShare Fest.She speaks, writes and consults about new forms of organization and leadership, the power of community andcollaboration. She tweets under @francescapick. Julia Dreher studied at Zeppelin University, Columbia University, NewYork, and at Sorbonne, Paris. She is working on questions concerning the constitution of power of civil society andorganizational theory with a focus on networks/heterarchies. Julia also worked for several Civil Society Organisation inFrance and Portugal, the House of World Cultures (HKW) in Berlin, and the German Agency for International Cooperation(GIZ) in Cairo, Egypt.

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autonomous organization.

***

Many of the best-known platforms currently associated with the sharing economy, such as Uber, are onlytransforming one part of the equation. In so doing, they perpetuate centralized, hierarchical, capitalistsystems that stymie any kind of fundamental societal transformation. It’s true that such marketplaces havebeen crucial for opening doors and spreading the concept of the sharing economy to the mainstream. Butcollaboration can mean a lot more than simply offering a platform for transactional sharing. As companieslike Uber come under increasing fire from the media, we may be tempted to write off the concept of the“sharing economy” altogether. Here though, it is important to look to the countless projects that trulyexemplify an ethos of sharing and collaboration to be reminded of the exciting potential of this movement.

When evaluating platforms claiming to be a part of the “sharing economy”, it is important to look at whythey were set up, how they are organized, and who they are intended to benefit. Those that implement alogic of collaboration, sharing and distributed power at each of these levels, stand to offer a compellingvehicle for change and force us to take seriously the transformational power of the ‘true’ sharing economy.

For Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy and hierarchy, see his ground-breaking work “Economy andSociety” (1922)

For a more in depth analysis of Uber’s organizational structure, see Janelle Orsi

For a deeper understanding of the difference between output and outcome of organizations see PatriceDuran’s “Légitimité, droit et action publique”

See for example Der Spiegel’s “Kalifornischer Kapitalismus” or Sebastian Olma’s “Never Mind the SharingEconomy: Here’s Platform Capitalism”

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Aaronon May 5th at 5:35 pm said:

In Rachel Botsman’s book she seems to have a simpler definition of the “sharing economy,” one thatleaves room for hierarchical and capitalist organizations. She separates share economy businesses intotwo categories: peer to peer, and business to consumer. The key difference between the two being thatP2P describes a business that only facilitates the transfer of goods or services between users, while B2Cdescribes a business that provides use of the goods or services while retaining ownership of them.What they have in common is that both allow people to use a good without having to own it.I would argue that B2C organizations facilitate shared consumption yet they operate as capitalist andhierarchical structures. Does this mean they fall outside the ‘true’ share economy?