Hitchhiker's Guide to the Collaborative Economy: Knowledge, Power and Asymmetric Information

From the 1970s, many governments started to link higher education policy with economic objectives. Over the last decades this link has been consolidated through the introduction of a wide-ranging marketisation agenda (e.g. user fees, demand-driven marketing, deregulation, etc.). Now, as governments are increasingly (and unwillingly in many cases) pushed to confront looming societal issues, universities have been given an additional "impact agenda". This impact agenda, largely driven by those systems pushing the marketisation of higher education, attempts to close the gap between higher education research and the solving of practical and applied societal problems. Criticisms aside, this impact agenda sits alongside another directive- the employability agenda– which demands that universities improve students' employability outcomes. Together, these agendas aim to unlock incremental social and economic innovation that facilitate the transition towards new economic-social futures beyond twentieth century industrial growth. But how achievable is this impact agenda? And what do researchers need to know about power, knowledge, and the machinations of capitalism if they are to address this agenda? Finally, how (and indeed should) they position themselves within this space?

Critiques of the impact agenda have been well canvassed elsewhere. In this paper I adopt a network perspective to excavate the network relations that embed and sustain the growth of the collaborative economy, and I illustrate the challenges of research in this climate. Through an exploration of the complexity of network knowledge-making interactions between diverse, heterogeneous, complementary and interdependent actors in collaborative economy accommodation sector, it is possible to gain insights into the different relational constellations, flows of power and knowledge that shape, reinforce and ensure the continued production of platform capitalism. I argue that researchers need to be knowledgeable about this landscape, to be reflexive of the power and knowledge flows, and the role of capitalism within this agenda.