共享经济组织:数字化时代的新组织性质与成长动因

Sharing Economy Organizations as Organizational Innovation in the Digital Age:Research on the New Organizational Nature and Growth Motivation

共享经济近年来成为影响全球的经济现象,催生了Airbnb、Uber、滴滴出行和共享单车等商业实践,被称为"共享经济组织"的新兴组织模式随之发展起来。该类组织快速成长的同时给企业组织理论带来了挑战,成为组织研究的前沿领域。基于组织生态学"选择—适应—保留"的理论分析框架,本文论证了共享经济组织的性质及其竞争优势来源,提出共享经济组织是新兴的特殊平台组织模式,区别于传统层级组织,能够同时实现交易成本与组织成本的降低;从组织内部来看,"资源编排性""自组织性"与"多元补偿性"的融合是共享经济组织区别于其他新组织形式、实现快速成长的动因;进一步提出共享经济组织成长的整合模型及研究命题。

Sharing economy has become a hot topic in recent years,which has spawned several commercial practices such as Airbnb,Uber,and Didi Chuxing.Based on the bibliometric analysis method,this article found out that:The research literature on sharing economy has exploded,and the research status of Chinese scholars has been significantly improved;The research results of sharing economy have been enriched and there is a full dialogue among them;The rise of organizational research in the sharing economy has given rise to organizational innovation in the digital era.Accordingly,the concept of sharing economy organizations has developed.The rapid growth of this type of organization has brought impact to the organization theory and has become an important research field.However,the research on the organizational nature and intrinsic motivation of the rapidly emerging sharing economy organization has been neglected.Based on this,this paper proposes the research question:What is the nature of the new form of sharing economy organization?What internal drivers are there to help it grow quickly?Based on theframework of"selection——adaptation——retention"in population ecology perspective,this article demonstrates the sharing economy organizations are emerging special platform organizations.It is a new organization with network characteristics formed under the background of network information technology.Compared with the traditional hierarchical organization,it is different in five dimensions:organizational characteristics,organizational mechanism,organizational structure,organizational subject,and organizational elements.The reason for this change is the change of economic,technological,and social environment faced by the organization.The rapid application of digital information technology represented by the Internet,big data,artificial intelligence,and the massive surplus of social resources have put forward new requirements for the operation of traditional organizational systems.Similarly,the traditional organization theory with the hierarchical organization as the research object has also encountered unprecedented challenges in explaining the law of the emergence,development,and operation of new organization phenomenon."Resource orchestration","self-organization"and"various compensation"of sharing economy organizations,can better reveal the motivation for the rapid growth of the organizations.Therefore,generated four propositions:(1)The unique natures of the sharing economy organizations lead to a competitive advantage over other organizational forms,thereby achieving rapid growth.(2)The sharing economy organizations enhance the organizations’dynamic management capabilities by orchestrating idle resources,thereby achieving rapid growth.(3)The self-organizing nature of the sharing economy organizations strengthens the dynamic stability of the organization,thereby achieving rapid growth.(4)The multiple compensatory nature of the sharing economy organizations attracts a wider range of participants,further stimulating network scale effects and achieving rapid growth.Furthermore,this paper constructs an integrated model of the growth of sharing economy organizations,explaining the process in which the sharing economy organization forms are developed in a constantly changing environment,derived from the initiative of entrepreneurs,and become a new type of organization that participates in the competition with other types of organizations.Sharing economy organization forms a relatively stable self-organizing network by cleverly arranging the idle resources connected to it,and provides diversified compensation forms to attract more and more participants to further participate in the resource arrangement,thus establishing a continuous operating cycle.In this way,sharing economy organizations gradually adapt to the changing environment and over time fill the business areas of organizations that have been eliminated by the environment(even the original successful business organizations).Within the group of sharing economy organizations,in the initial stage,they will compete with each other for similar resources or similar customers.Finally,organizations that are more adaptable to the environment will be retained,grow,and become several successful sharing economy organization forms.