Today, there has been growing concern on how to live a life more sustainable in terms of people’s needs and consumptions, globally with no exception in Sweden. It is due to the challenges that society faces to ensure the existence of resources availability for current as well as future generation. At the same time, we are looking at an era where the advancement of technology could incentivize people to shift their consumption pattern from acquiring new products to used goods from other peers. This technology provides the possibility for peer communication and matchmaking to exchange goods from local communities to different regions within the country. This practice is widely known as the sharing economy, although many other similar terms are used by academic scholars as well as business practitioners. As of today, several studies have attempted to understand people’s motives for participating in the sharing economy practice. Nevertheless, some other aspects have not been thoroughly researched, such as the social interaction within the practice. Social interaction is perceived as one of the essential features that the sharing economy heavily relies on among the two practitioners. Hence, the main aim of this study is to understand the role of social interaction between peers while outlining the dimensions within an interaction that affects participation. Therefore, a qualitative study was adopted for this thesis by interviewing eight Swedes while observing the second-hand platforms they were exercising. In this study, we adopted the Social Practice Theory as our theoretical framework to comprehend the meaning behind the practitioners’ involvement, the competence they display, and the materials they curate within the practice. The findings of this study illustrated that social interaction was not only an essential part in the second-hand practice, but also inevitable to avoid completely. Furthermore, our empirical findings illustrated social interaction as a gateway to receive financial benefits while simultaneously offering the practitioners the possibility of manifesting their virtues through the practice. Moreover, we also discovered that social interaction was a crucial element for promoting but also preserving practice. The aspect of social interaction makes the involved practitioners need to manage the adequate know-how/understanding and competencies to get benefits from the practice, such as negotiation capability, dispute handling, risk evaluation, and managing overly apprehension. In addition, we found it beneficial to distinguish the buying practice and the selling practice as two different practices instead of a single practice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-447245 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Nuur, Ahmed, Randia, Fadel |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för samhällsbyggnad och industriell teknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | SAMINT-MILI |
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