Processual exploration of Airbnb: facets of user governance, platform processes, and placemaking

Abstract

The sharing economy has the potential to challenge highly corporatized methods of exchange, yet its dominant players operate within the logics of platform capitalism. Burgeoning literature across the social sciences shows that Airbnb can gentrify neighborhoods, create new touristic actors and places, and embed itself in policy that perpetuates its success. But scholarship largely treats Airbnb as single, black-boxed entity, obscuring its complex system. My research both looks into and beyond this opacity to deepen our understanding of Airbnb’s social, digital, and economic qualities. This thesis offers a new creative lens through which to investigate platforms as complex, evolving systems, which operationalizes science and technology studies’ biographies of artefacts and practices framework (Pollock and Williams, 2009) with several empirical sociological facet studies. These generate “flashes of insight” (Mason 2011) into the entwined components of Airbnb’s multifaceted system: its social, digital, and material configurations. My netnographic research draws on four years of platform walkthroughs, 26 interviews with Airbnb hosts, guests, producers, and subject matter experts, and participant observation in Edinburgh to explore facets of Airbnb’s user governance, platform processes, and placemaking.

I begin by embedding a critical discussion of how Airbnb makes users and what those users make within an account of Airbnb’s historical development, introducing a mutually constructive and processual relationship between users and technology. I then describe the components of its platform and the infrastructures it relies on, from the micro level entities and associations to its meso level placemarkets, knowledge graph, and platform. Situating Airbnb within the macro ecosystems of the sharing economy imaginary and the semantic web connects the parts and the whole of Airbnb with broader social, technical, and economic phenomena. This thesis ultimately attempts to theorize three substantive facets of what Airbnb facilitates. First, hosts are governed by both the platform’s affordances and the relationship labor of its employees and users. This embeds Airbnb’s power throughout its system, shaping the content and use patterns of the platform to support its corporate aims. Second, Airbnb’s platform processes of standardization, classification, and association making order the cultural content of the platform to create the desire to travel with Airbnb. Third, Airbnb makes place in both mediated and lived experiences of Edinburgh, illuminating how its constant engagement with the city and users is an ongoing process of production and meaning making. When considered collectively, these facets make visible the processes that Airbnb facilitates and advances our broader understanding of what platforms do. This work ultimately contributes to our sociological platform literacy, advocates for a multifaceted approach to social digital research, and contributes to a processual turn in empirical platform studies.