The Social Regulations of Shared Objects and Spaces In Organizations

Daily sharing of objects in organizations is a pervasive yet undertheorized feature of organizational life. A growing body of research has examined the "sharing economy," but this literature predominantly addresses large-scale, platform-mediated exchange between strangers. Far less attention has been paid to the mundane sharing that structures everyday organizational life: when day shifts yield workstations to night shifts, when coworkers dispute the use of a coffee machine, or when members of a tiers-lieu or a religious community govern shared objects and spaces.

Sharing objets in organizations carries a double promise: it is celebrated as a source of collective bonds, solidarity, and environmental sobriety. Yet it is equally a site of persistent conflict and tension, one that can unravel the very collective it was meant to build. Utopian communities projects have sometimes collapsed, even when commons governance principles (Ostrom) appear to be met. Belk's extended self theory suggests that objects sharing is invested with identity and psychic stakes. Attending to the materiality and affordances of shared objects further invites us to consider how objects themselves, not only social actors, may act as sources of social regulations (Reynaud). A further underexplored dimension is that of the body: sharing implicates the very bodies of those who share : eg. touching the same objects as others, displaying one's skill or clumsiness. Crucially, the care of shared objects (their cleaning, maintenance, and repair) tends to fall along gendered lines, making sharing a terrain where gender and power relations are enacted and sometimes contested.