Platform Stories: The Role of Ideological Narratives in the Development of a Tourism Sharing Business Model

Abstract

This article explores the development process of a sharing platform in the tourism industry, drawing on a longitudinal case study of a sharing-based business in adventure tourism in Sweden. The purpose is to explore how sharing business models emerge through processes of ideological narration—the strategic use of stories to shape and sustain a business. Over a two-year period, empirical data were collected through in-depth interviews, participant observations, and document study. The findings suggest that sharing business models are developed in processes of ideological narration designed to attract labour, capital, and users to a digital platform. Four master narratives are identified—sharing, sustainability, shared identity, and profit-making—narratives grounded in conflicting ideological logics. The dominance of these narratives shifts over time, reflecting different priorities and challenges encountered at various stages of a sharing business model’s development. This dynamic highlights the fluid and multi-faceted nature of narratives in shaping and sustaining sharing businesses in the tourism industry.

1. Introduction

The sharing economy has given rise to new forms of organisation based on the social production and consumption of communities on digital platforms (Dredge & Gyimóthy, 2015; Peticca-Harris et al., 2020; Pelgander et al., 2022). In the sharing economy, institutions or individuals with idle resources transfer the right to use goods to others through a third-party payment platform (Zhu & Liu, 2021). There is great promise for the potential of the sharing economy to generate new forms of value that can disrupt traditional businesses and lead to innovation (Cohen et al., 2017; Frenken & Schor, 2019). Both the private and public actors are currently in the process of testing new digital business models for sharing services and resources. Tourism is a key market for these kinds of sharing services offered on digital platforms (Kannisto, 2017), with Airbnb and Uber as prominent examples, and the development is fast (Navickas et al., 2021).

The novelty of sharing as a mode of organising digital business platforms lies in their hybrid networking functions, which can serve commercial and social purposes simultaneously (Gyimóthy, 2017). Some platforms are about the genuine sharing and pooling of resources, while others are more about facilitating monetised exchanges. However, as many platforms face what Besharov and Smith (2014) describe as “contested logics”—that is, they follow a dual logic of organising for both the common good and financial sustainability—they need to balance conflicting logics. Laurell and Sandström capture these dual logics when they define the sharing economy as “ICT-enabled platforms for the exchange of goods and services that draw on non-market logics such as sharing, lending, gifting and swapping, as well as market logics such as renting and selling” (Laurell & Sandström, 2017, p. 58). This ideological ambiguity of the sharing economy is consistent with its many definitions, which have been variously referred to as the collaborative economy, the peer-to-peer economy, the participatory economy (Gössling et al., 2021), the on-demand economy (Cockayne, 2016), the gig economy, the platform economy, and post-capitalism (Peticca-Harris et al., 2020).

Sharing businesses operate on digital platforms involving community-based social production and consumption (Acquier et al., 2017; Kassan & Orsi, 2012), although there is a high degree of diversity in sharing business model patterns (Curtis, 2021; Öberg, 2023). The value proposition lies in disintermediation, enabling direct transactions between providers and consumers for a fee (Vendrell-Herrero et al., 2018). Cutting out the middleman results in lower transaction costs and prices, on-demand access, instant payments, and verification opportunities for providers and users of the platform. Previous research has begun to categorise and discuss the business models of sharing platforms (e.g., Constantiou et al., 2017; Curtis, 2021; Öberg, 2023; Abdalla et al., 2024). However, the actual generation of sharing business models lacks theoretical knowledge (Abdalla et al., 2024), and in-depth empirical case studies on how they emerge are scarce. Thornton (2024) performed six case studies (five of them within the tourism industry) of sharing business model evolution from the perspective of internationalisation, demonstrating how sharing businesses engage in a series of business model changes and internationalisation steps that reinforce each other. She recommends carrying out further research on sharing businesses, following them over an extended time. As numerous enterprises enter the sharing market, and many struggle to succeed, in-depth empirical studies are needed to explore how sharing platforms emerge and how their business models develop over time. This article presents a longitudinal case study on the emergent process through which an entrepreneur and his team developed a digital sharing platform. The study is based on interviews, participant observation of work meetings, and observations of the digital platform. The case company is an adventure tourism start-up in Sweden.

The focus of this article is on understanding how sharing businesses in the tourism industry act over time to build a sharing platform, i.e., how the activities, practices, actions, and sayings of the entrepreneurs impact the emergence of the platform (cf. Mason et al., 2015), and how contested and conflicting rationalities and ideologies are negotiated. It is argued that sharing platforms perform ideological narratives (cf. Perkmann & Spicer, 2010) to mobilise labour, community, resources, and goodwill (cf. Peticca-Harris et al., 2020). It is sometimes suggested that Airbnb’s unprecedented success lies in its ability to perform and enact ideological narratives of sharing to attract users to the platform (Cockayne, 2016; Gyimóthy, 2017). The narratives serve as persuasion, typifications that legitimise, and recipes that guide social action (cf. Perkmann & Spicer, 2010). Sharing platforms typically rely on socially progressive narratives of promoting the more sustainable consumption of products and services, where consumers access, rather, than own resources (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012; Belk, 2014; Hamari et al., 2015), combined with fostering communities of consumers who share social values and norms. These narratives can influence the identity of the platform community and users’ sense of belonging, for example by alluding to users’ emotional engagement (cf. Perkmann & Spicer, 2010). Little attention has, so far, been paid to the importance of the narratives of the sharing ideology in facilitating the mobilisation and insourcing of community resources to develop the platform.

The purpose of this article is to explore how sharing platforms emerge through processes of ideological narration. The research question is as follows: What narratives do sharing businesses use over time to develop their platform? The case study identifies four distinctive narratives during four phases of the emergence of the platform. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: First, we present our theoretical framework, which consists of a narrative perspective on business models. Second, we describe our methodology and research approach. Third, based on our theoretical framework, we show the narratives used during four phases of the platform’s development. Finally, we discuss the results of this study and draw some conclusions.

2. Narrating Sharing Business Models

There is a large body of literature on business models (Massa et al., 2017), although some researchers argue that this research is still in its infancy (Wieland et al., 2017). More recently, the concept has emerged in streams of literature on different variations of business models, such as sustainable business models (Nosratabadi et al., 2019) and digital business models (Verhoef & Bijmolt, 2019; Luz Martín-Peña et al., 2018). The sharing economy business model is a form of digital business model that is generally considered to be different from those of traditional marketplaces in its ability to “combine organisational and market mechanisms to coordinate platform participation and ultimately create value” (Constantiou et al., 2017, pp. 231–232).

Perkmann and Spicer (2010) identify three views on general business models. The first view concerns business models as transactional structures, describing how firms configure their transactions with groups of stakeholders. For example, Zott and Amit (2010, p. 219) define a business model as “the content, structure and governance of transactions designed to create value by exploiting business opportunities”. The second view is that business models are mechanisms for creating economic value, while the third view sees business models as devices for structuring and designing organisations. This article approaches sharing platform business models from the perspective of seeing them as cognitive/linguistic schemas (Massa et al., 2017), where narratives are used as devices for structuring and designing sharing business models. Thus, the emergence of sharing business models is achieved through performing narratives that produce material effects. As Richardson (2015) proposed, it is possible to gain mobilising capacities through narratives linked to the consecrated concepts and ideologies of the sharing economy, and these narratives define the meaning of the sharing business model in the actual context. Sharp (2018) shows how the narrative of the sharing economy is played out by the actors of the sharing platform, using an example quote from the co-founder of the sharing platform Sharable (p. 520): “Imagine a city where everyone’s needs are met because people make the personal choice to share. Where everyone can create a meaningful livelihood”. Such narratives can attract (or repel) users, persuade investors, and control partners and employees.

Therefore, sharing business models can be understood as being produced in and through narrative discourse (e.g., talk, texts, and conversations) that construct their communicative realities (cf. Brummans et al., 2014; Schoeneborn et al., 2014). To conceptualise how narratives are enacted, the communicative constitution of organisation (CCO) literature is drawn on, in particular, the Montreal School approach (Schoeneborn & Vasquez, 2017; Schoeneborn et al., 2014), with its emphasis on communication as a cultural practice that is constitutive of reality. This approach emphasises the processual nature of organisational identity and image formation (Craig, 1999). A central part of the CCO approach is that organising is carried out through communication in such a way that text and conversation give rise to a communicative reality (Brummans et al., 2014). From this perspective, business models are understood as actor-centred rather than firm-centred (Wieland et al., 2017).

Furthermore, this paper examines sharing business models as promissory constructs—articulations of future potential rather than immediate realities (Schoeneborn & Trittin, 2013). This aligns with Perkmann and Spicer’s (2010) argument that business models are inherently performative of reality in three key ways: (1) as narratives that persuade, (2) as typifications that legitimise, and (3) as recipes that instruct. Thus, it is possible to understand business models as narrative devices that allow organisational actors to explore markets, recruit allies, and increasingly perform the world they are narrating (Araujo & Easton, 2012; Doganova & Eyquem-Renault, 2009; Magretta, 2002). By skilfully and engagingly bringing the components of a story together in a narrative, entrepreneurs can frame innovations and new technologies as plausible and appealing. For example, business model narratives can mobilise fantasy scenarios, use widely known cultural myths, appeal to archetypal characters, construct a series of episodes, and mobilise familiar literary tropes (Perkmann & Spicer, 2010). Perkmann and Spicer (2010) argue that a business model allows a firm to associate itself with a particular type or identity, thereby creating a sense of legitimacy and meaning (Suchman, 1995), and to identify with similar firms while distancing itself from others (Fisher, 2020). They also suggest that business models provide recipes that instruct actors in the firm on what to do. Here, the performance of business models extends beyond their narratives—it also encompasses how these narratives are enacted by actors within the community. This article explores how the narratives of a sharing business shape a shared identity, thereby actively contribute to the formation and cohesion of the sharing community.

3. Methodology

3.1. Case Study Research Design

This study employed a qualitative approach using a case study research design to gain an in-depth understanding of the process of developing a business model. A case study approach was chosen for its ability to generate a comprehensive, multi-faceted understanding of a complex issue within its real-life context (cf. Yin, 2014). This research design is widely utilised in social sciences due to its capacity to explore phenomena in their natural settings, contrasting with experimental designs that seek to manipulate variables (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Merriam (1994) argues that sometimes it is only by considering a single case that one can get a complete picture of the interaction of different factors or actors in a given situation The empirical material in this article was drawn from a longitudinal case study of a Swedish adventure tourism start-up, anonymised in this article as “Dawn”. The start-up was founded in 2015 by a prominent local entrepreneur in adventure sports, anonymised here as “Adrian”. Dawn is a digital sharing platform for booking guide services in adventure sports, such as kayaking, kitesurfing, and skiing. The platform functions as an intermediary connecting guide service providers with adventure tourists. This study followed the evolution of Dawn’s business model from the idea phase to the launch, tracking developments between October 2016 and December 2018. In line with the qualitative research strategy, this study’s approach was exploratory and inductive (Eisenhart, 1989; Patton, 2002; Flyvbjerg, 2006), aiming to understand the iterative and dynamic nature of business model development (cf. Czarniawska, 2004a).

3.2. Data Collection Methods

A combination of qualitative data collection methods was employed, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis (see

Table 1. Summary of empirical data.

Qualitative Method	Number	Length	Date	Mode	Focus
Participant Observation	2	2–3 h	February 2017, March 2017	Physical	Work meetings between the entrepreneur and team members
Participant Observation	3	2–3 h	March 2017 (three occurrences)	Online meetings	Work meetings between the entrepreneur and team members
Participant Observation	29	Conversation	2017–2018	Online conversations (Slack)	Work conversations between the entrepreneur and team members
In-Depth Interview	9	1–2 h	October 2016, November 2016 (twice), February 2017, May 2017, June 2017, October 2017, February 2018, September 2018	Online	Entrepreneur
In-Depth Interview	4	1–2 h	December 2016, March 2017, April 2017, November 2017	Physical	Entrepreneur
In-Depth Interview	2	1–2 h	December 2016, April 2017	Physical	Team member
Document Study	10	50–500 words	2016–2018	Email	Email correspondence with the entrepreneur
Document Study	-	65 pages	2017–2018	Text	Website, guide platform applications, Instagram and Facebook posts

). This multi-method approach provided a comprehensive understanding of the business model development process by capturing both retrospective reflections and real-time interactions.

3.2.1. In-Depth Interviews

A total of 15 in-depth interviews were conducted, with a primary focus on Adrian, the entrepreneur and founder of the business. Additionally, two interviews were carried out with a key team member who remained with the start-up for an extended period, offering valuable insights into the platform’s evolution. Interviews were conducted both online (via Skype) and in person, ensuring a diverse range of perspectives on the challenges and strategies involved in developing the sharing business model.

3.2.2. Participant Observation

To capture the real-time evolution of the business model, 34 team meetings involving Adrian and contract workers were observed and recorded. These meetings took place both on-site and via online collaboration tools such as Skype and Slack. The purpose of participant observation was to document how the business model took shape through ongoing discussions, complementing the retrospective insights gained from interviews. In addition, real-time conversations on Slack were analysed to understand how decisions were made and how the team navigated challenges. These observations enriched the study by capturing spontaneous interactions (Borda, 2006), offering a nuanced view of the complexities involved in building the platform.

3.2.3. Document Study

The document analysis focused on how Dawn engaged with both guides and tourists, as well as how its business model was operationalised in practice. The analysis included Instagram and Facebook posts, website content, and the mobile application, providing insights into the platform’s branding, communication, and user engagement strategies. Furthermore, email exchanges between Adrian and the researchers were reviewed to gain further context on decision-making processes and business model iterations.

3.3. Data Analysis

The data were analysed holistically using a narrative analysis approach in which the data were coded and examined iteratively (Czarniawska, 2004b). Each researcher initially conducted an independent analysis of the collected data before engaging in collaborative discussions to identify emerging themes and enhance their reliability and trustworthiness (Patton, 2002). The analysis focused on the participants’ interpretations and experiences in implementing the business model and was structured in three steps: categorising, comparing, and dimensionalising (Spiggle, 1994).

A combination of deductive and inductive approaches was used for coding (categorisation), with theoretical constructs guiding the analysis. Some passages were easily identifiable as descriptions of practice, while others reflected broader ideas, influences, or social conventions. These passages were coded twice. In addition, unanticipated findings led to the creation of new codes using in vivo coding.

The coding process was followed by dimensionalisation. The different codes were grouped into conceptual categories, constructing broader analytical themes (Spiggle, 1994). Differences within codes were identified and compared to reveal nuanced variation. The analysis resulted in master narratives that shaped the emergence of the start-up’s business model and traced its ideological foundations (Gramsci, 2005): sharing, environmental and social sustainability, shared identity, and profit-making. These master narratives emerged at different phases of the development process. The results are presented in the following section.

4. Findings

The analysis revealed four typical narratives—sharing, sustainability, identity, and profit-making—each shaping the business model at different phases of its development. These phases are presented below in chronological order.

4.1. Narratives of Sharing

In the early phase of development, Dawn relied on a master narrative of sharing to promote the platform to investors. Previous research has shown that sharing platforms often strike a balance between an altruistic ideology of sharing and a profit-driven logic (Gyimóthy, 2017; Laurell & Sandström, 2017). This fusion between the social aim of making the world a better place and a strong belief in the principles of the radical free market can be found in what is referred to as the Californian ideology. Barbrook and Cameron (1996, p. 1) describe this ideology as “the heterogenous orthodoxy of the information age”. This particular ideology originates in the 1960s Californian New Left movement and is argued to traditionally govern the narration of the Silicon Valley high-tech industries. It is characterised by a conflictual relationship between resistance to social conventions; the championing of progressive political issues, e.g., a universal basic income, progressive taxation, and social justice; and simultaneously advocating market capitalism. Similar conflictual ideological values are present in the brand narratives of successful sharing organisations, e.g., Airbnb and Uber, and this is mimicked by smaller platform companies and start-ups. These narratives are often about driving social change and more sustainable modes of consumption and production in the form of sharing, and there is a strong ideological emphasis on community and anti-consumerism (Ozanne & Ballantine, 2010; O’Reagan & Choe, 2017). Airbnb’s community illustrates this ideology well in its vision of an egalitarian ecotopia.

In the case of Dawn, similar communitarian values were communicated to legitimise and differentiate this start-up during the early phases of its development. Members of the Dawn community, including the entrepreneur Adrian, his team of temporary IT professionals who set up the platform, and the prospective users of that platform (adventure guides and adventure consumers), all enacted the sharing ideology by adopting its narrative rhetoric. Adrian embodied the values of the ideology by leaving a promising career in finance for a less secure but more self-fulfilling job as an entrepreneur in adventure tourism. Adrian had high hopes for the platform as a professional meeting place for the service providers and users of the adventure sports community, with social purposes also being served at the same time. In December 2016, Adrian said, “Initially, it was connected to my wish to create some form of platform for finding and interacting with like-minded friends and doing sports activities.” He saw it as a platform that would create opportunities for adventurers to meet and share their knowledge of how to create safe adventure experiences of high quality. Adrian also saw the platform as a way for adventure guides to become less dependent on tourism organisations and other larger tourism intermediaries, e.g., the Swedish leisure company Skistar, in marketing and distributing their services. In his view, the Dawn platform would lead to a disintermediation process in the adventure industry in terms of taking away traditional intermediators between guides and customers. In this way, Adrian wanted to empower the adventure guides. He said (in December 2016), “I want to give competent people better opportunities to develop and have a better income doing what they are trained for”.

Furthermore, Adrian also viewed the platform as an opportunity for human progress and societal development, saying in April 2017, “What I’m trying to do with the platform is open up the adventure community to more … I have a vision of human progress, to push humanity in the right direction”). For example, Adrian mentioned the opportunity for rural places to use the platform for destination development to attract tourists and to create an economic impact and employment for adventure guides. Thus, Adrian’s vision was connected to the adventure community on different levels. First, he performed a visionary narrative of developing a society promoting progress and knowledge. Secondly, he narrated stories of how to empower adventure guides and instructors and give them access to the market. Third, he performed attractive narratives of how people (consumers and guides) would benefit from the platform by means of opportunities for meeting like-minded people interested in adventure sports.

Adrian manifested altruistic values by emphasising that he had been working for several years with his business without any funding and that the people he had invited into the venture had been working for free or on low wages. In April 2017, a member of the team called Ben said, “I said early on that I wasn’t interested in the money. I joined the team because I thought it would be a fun service to develop.” These narrations of altruistic value, in terms of contributing to society and the adventure community, can be seen as a way to legitimise the business as a moral player in the sharing economy but also as an attempt to justify and normalise flexible and precarious work (Cockayne, 2016). The narrative of ‘working just for fun’ may be seen as the way in which power operates in an ideological mode. By establishing the business model on the basis of such an ideological narrative, it becomes possible to exercise power by means of domination through the construction of ideological values (Fleming & Spicer, 2014). This view of power captures a type of politics that defines the very terrain where actors understand their organisational situation (Fleming & Spicer, 2014, building on Lukes’s (2005) view of power). By performing the narratives of the sharing ideology, Dawn (temporarily) mobilised a community of unsalaried workers, investors, and platform users. Thus, appealing stories were narrated about both sharing and seemingly fantasy scenarios (Perkmann & Spicer, 2010) regarding how the platform would change the adventure industry on many levels.

4.2. Narratives of Social and Environmental Sustainability

The second master narrative identified in the development of the Dawn sharing business model is tied both to the ideology of sustainability (Baptista, 2014) and to value conflicts between economic growth and social progression and wellbeing. The sharing economy is often viewed as having the potential to create more sustainable business models (Gupta & Chauhan, 2021), with sharing platform organisations often framing their activities in terms of social and environmental sustainability. Adrian had a strong vision of the platform leading to social sustainability for adventure sports practitioners.

My driving force goes beyond building a company. My incentives are a lot more about societal development and how the value of knowledge should be rewarded and remunerated. Many professionals aren’t paid for their knowledge, and I think that this lack of compensation hinders the development of society. (…) Individuals in the countryside could be more fairly compensated for their knowledge, guiding people where they live, hunt, kayak, and so on.

(Adrian, March 2017, interview)

The aim of empowering adventure guides was also part of how the Dawn business narrative was communicated via the platform.

We create new business possibilities through smart digital interactions and integrations, and we aim to work closely with our users to expand local businesses and contribute to positive change. Being an outdoor professional is a challenging occupation. Dealing with conditions in order to bring safe experiences to clients is time consuming and demands extensive physical work. A line of work often driven by passion rather than financial gain. We aim to help you reduce time consumption, increase earnings from your services, and keep your passion intact. For a flexible, free, and secure future. We increase possibilities of reaching out and expand the horizon of financial possibilities and personal empowerment.

(Dawn platform, August 2017, original language)

The narrative conveys the trade-off between passion and profit, and between individual and economic growth. It constructs the sharing platform in terms of striving for social and environmental sustainability, while at the same time leading to economic opportunity and employment.

We bring working possibilities to your local environment.

(Dawn platform, September 2017)

ENVIRONMENT. Our oceans, rivers, mountains, glaciers, forests, and all other ecosystems with its inhabitants are interfered by human activity. We are dedicated to contribute and drive positive sustainable change for interacting with our planet. Sustainability is not enough. We believe in human growth, and we need to address habitability in the perspective of holistic living conditions. We believe this is the future of co-living in a healthy, loving, and joyful way. We highlight the benefits of an outdoor lifestyle for individual health and cognitive behaviour. Protect our playgrounds—This is our pledge! We support: Initiatives for preservation of rivers, Projects for securing water supplies, Dismantling of inefficient and non-sustainable energy sources, Renewable and abundant energy sources, Ocean cleaning, Ocean preservation, Removal of non-sustainable manufacturing, Sustainable public legislation, New technology for sustainable lifestyles.

(Dawn platform, November 2018, original language)

The Dawn narrative, at the outset, was an ideological endeavour regarding how a more sustainable lifestyle could be achieved for the adventure sports community and society in general. The narratives dealt with freedom, social progress, knowledge, and breaking free from conventional lifestyles and ways of doing business, echoing the Californian ideology. In performing such narratives, Adrian and his team wanted to make the sharing business model legitimate, i.e., worth using, committing to, and investing in (cf. Suchman, 1995), in the adventure sports community.

4.3. Narratives of Shared Identity

The third master narrative in the Dawn business model concerns mobilising the adventure community by narrating a shared identity. Adrian embodied the adventurous outdoor lifestyle of this community. He worked as a stockbroker for many years in Stockholm but decided to downsize into what he calls a ‘freer life close to nature’. He indulged his passion for adventure sports and became a certified instructor and guide in alpine skiing and kitesurfing. Prior to founding Dawn, he ran a bed and breakfast in a popular Swedish summer resort famous among surfers. Thus, even when Dawn was founded, he had an established position in the adventure sports communities of Sweden and Europe. The business model used primarily relied on this entrepreneur’s personal connections, relationships, and position in the adventure community.

Sales are initially being made on the personal level. I have a rather large network in this business, in different segments, for several reasons. I have many contacts, and I spent several seasons in the Alps. I’m a kitesurfing instructor, which is close to other surf sports like wind surfing, wave surfing, SUP, and so on. I have a great interest in outdoor activities, so I’m very active on an advanced level in several other sports like kayaking, trekking, cycling, and I also have a network of private contacts. I’ve also worked for many years with xxx—a shop selling adventure sports equipment. (…) My personal connections and background will take me a long way in introducing this service.

(Adrian, December 2016, interview)

A key feature of sharing business models is that they depend on a community of users to fill that platform with content and to recruit other users to do so as well. Adrian’s idea was to co-create the platform with its users throughout the development process in a user-centric manner (cf. Buhalis et al., 2019). Also, Adrian argued that it was important to gather content for the platform and recruit members into the community before making it public. A way to achieve this was to narrate the lifestyle of the adventure community, in this way expressing the identity of Dawn. In his social media communication, relating both to him personally and to Dawn, narratives were performed referring to exclusive destinations for adventure sports insiders, e.g., islands in the Swedish archipelago and particular spots in the French Alps, in doing so reinforcing the identity of Dawn as a platform for adventurers.

We provide a powerful mobile operation management and financial transaction system for location-independent outdoor professionals. However, we aren’t just a service provider. We’re also skiers and surfers. We spend time with our users and their clients. That’s who we are, and we’ll keep our service in tune with them. (…) We’re currently leaving a tropical summer in the Baltics for autumn surfing adventures and trekking in Europe together with our users.

(Dawn platform, November 2017)

Thus, Dawn was established by framing this business as a particular way of life. As Canniford and Karababa (2013) contend, adventure sports provide an alternative to the urban rationalised and restricted way of life and, as Adrian put it, “It’s much more than just the sport … it’s about alternative ways to live, almost a bit subversive”. Adrian and his team performed narratives depicting their identities as free and adventurous individuals. By means of being authentic to the users and connecting to the cultural world of adventure sports, the intention was to create a strong brand identity (cf. Holt, 2004).

This adventure identity was also reflected in the composition of the Dawn work team. When recruiting people into the venture, Adrian spent a lot of time ensuring that new workers shared his values and priorities. The blurred boundary between work and everyday life in the creative and adventure industries has been acknowledged in previous research. Land and Taylor (2010), for instance, demonstrate how corporations use co-workers’ personal interests and lifestyles as resources in constructing brand identities. This conflation between the personal and the professional in the workplace may, on the one hand, be viewed as a way of humanising the corporation and making it more authentic (Land & Taylor, 2010). But on the other, the valorisation of personal interests, identities, aspirations, and so on means that the capitalist logic is extended into people’s life worlds, resulting in companies exercising subjectification processes of what constitutes the person, his/her lived sense of identity, and selfhood (Fleming & Spicer, 2014). The management of values and identities was visible in the case of Dawn. Members of the Dawn development team were constantly being replaced due to their incompatible views regarding what the company should stand for, and how it should be owned and organised. Adrian’s way of rationalising the high rate of staff turnover was to ascribe it to his values and ambitions conflicting with those of his co-workers. This conflation of the private and the professional led to co-workers not sharing Adrian’s values and ambitions leaving the start-up.

One of the big challenges of leading this project has been finding a good team. Finding people with the right mindset and the right perspective for this business is very difficult. Is this person showing the right level of commitment to his work? During the processes, people have joined and left. They’ve left because our views on the purpose of the start-up have been at odds. Entering into a business relationship is like entering into a loving relationship. It’s exactly the same thing. You expect different things from one another, and if these do not match, you go your separate ways.

(Adrian, October, 2017, interview)

During the early phase of the start-up, Adrian did not regard compelling narratives as sufficient to recruit like-minded co-workers and users to the platform. Instead, a value-based approach was adopted, focusing on rules and strictly formulated values that would attract and unite entrepreneurs, guides, and consumers in a form of homogenous community based on a shared identity. Thus, the business model was narrated in a way that provided explicit recipes (Perkmann & Spicer, 2010) that instruct community members as to what they should do. In order to come across as authentic, Adrian maintained that it was important for the values to also be conveyed as part of the respective co-worker’s individual ideological beliefs. A number of values were formulated by Adrian and his team and expressed on the Dawn platform:

Working guidelines

(1)

We listen to our users;

(2)

We have fun;

(3)

We stay active and adventurous;

(4)

We share our experiences;

(5)

We are locally present;

(6)

We spend time together;

(7)

We encourage innovation and new solutions;

(8)

We embrace new technology and practices that will enhance the user experience and possibilities;

(9)

Our decisions are holistic and long-term;

(10)

We work for sustainable practices.

(Dawn platform, September 2017, original language)

These values served as instructions to members of the sharing community, defining community insiders and outsiders. Members were expected to have a particularly active lifestyle and to have the time to interact with other members. In this way, the sharing platform gained power through the subjectivisation of users, emotional engagement, and a shared identity.

Dawn’s business model is narrated in this way to mobilise the ‘right’ people who fit Dawn’s prescribed lifestyle and values. These lifestyles and values are visually reinforced on the platform and in social media with images of a free, carefree, and playful life in the outdoors. The visuals typically depict young, strong, white males surfing ocean waves or skiing through freshly fallen powder snow, often alone in the great outdoors. These narratives naturally appeal to certain groups of people. As such, they can be understood as an effective way of exercising power through subjectification (Fleming & Spicer, 2014). By communicating appealing narratives in a particular way, community members build and reinforce a shared identity based on adventure sports—an identity that defines meaning based on what is right and valuable and who is to be considered part of the shared identity.

4.4. Narratives of Profit-Making

In the final phase of the development process of the business model, Dawn focused on a master narrative of profit-making, which seemed contradictory to the altruistic ideology of the sharing narrative. The Dawn platform was designed from the outset to facilitate guiding services and activities in terms of planning, booking, payment, inventory, and equipment exchange (e.g., sharing, leasing, or swapping). The design themes of the platform were presented by Adrian as a novel structure and form of governance in adventure sports, with the potential to disrupt and change conventional business models in the industry by removing the intermediary between supplier and consumer. The intention was to build a strong community that would lead to lock-in effects. The value to guides and instructors was increased efficiency through reduced transaction costs. Gradually, more services would appear on the platform in a co-creative process within the industry community. As the sharing business model depended on the transaction fees generated through the platform, traction (a high volume of users) was critical to its success. Thus, although Dawn’s narratives were about sharing, sustainability, and adventure sports lifestyles, they followed the dual logic of business for the common good and financial gain (cf. Besharov & Smith, 2014).

The narrative of profit-making was increasingly becoming visible as the Dawn team realised the difficulties in launching the platform, expressed here in the explanation of this start-up’s commission-based system.

Dawn is dedicated to create unique solutions for the support of independent personal empowerment and long-term livelihood to outdoor professionals. Our product is a business management tool aimed to simplify administration and promote sales and client relations by addressing the challenges of working in nature. It is free to use our service; however, your clients will pay a small service fee to Dawn when booking an event.

(Dawn platform, December, 2017, original language)

This links to sharing platforms’ market-based controversies regarding who makes the money (Murillo et al., 2017) and the fact that sharing platforms are criticised for taking the profit-driven logic to an extreme by not taking full responsibility for the working conditions emanating from their platforms (Frenken & Schor, 2019). In the case of Dawn, however, the failure to attract enough users onto the platform to make it financially sustainable led to bankruptcy.

5. Discussion

Since the rise of the sharing economy, critics have pointed to its inherent contradictions (Frenken & Schor, 2019; Martin, 2016). Sharing invigorates access-based consumption (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012; Belk, 2014) (and thus, it is argued, leads to a more sustainable resource use) and provides economic opportunities and employment to marginalised social groups. At the same time, sharing business models have been seen as a kind of ‘neoliberalism on steroids’, with unregulated markets threatening regulated businesses, the rise of the precariat, and the undermining of the welfare state (Murillo et al., 2017; Peticca-Harris et al., 2020). Cockayne (2016) discusses how sharing is used as an attempt to justify and normalise flexible and precarious work, by ambiguously linking capitalist exchange and altruistic social value. This fuzzy ideological hybrid, sometimes referred to as the ‘Californian ideology’ (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996), has proved effective in empowering citizens and consumers to launch their ‘movements’ and join forces in a common, meaningful cause. The Dawn case study illustrates how a sharing platform is built using the narratives of such an ideology. Dawn claims to offer a novel structure and governance of guide services in adventure tourism with the potential to disrupt and transform the industry in ways that benefit both producers (guides) and consumers (adventurers). This is claimed to increase efficiency in matching guides and consumers and to reduce transaction costs.

As illustrated above in the article, Dawn communicated its business model through ideological narratives of sharing, sustainability, and a strong community identity based on adventure sports, while also communicating a narrative of profit-making (Figure 1). These narratives were used simultaneously but, however, with a stronger focus on the narrative of sharing in the first phase of developing the platform and more focus on profitmaking in the last phase (before the business went into bankruptcy). In Figure 1, the narratives are plotted along a timeline of Dawn’s business model development, showing that the different narratives were more prevalent at different phases. Narratives of sharing and sustainability were dominant in the first year of business model development, with narratives of community identity growing stronger over time. Narratives of profit-making became dominant in the final phase, apparently due to the marked lack of financial resources available to continue developing the platform. Thus, tensions between communitarian and capitalist logics became more pronounced over time. This finding is consistent with research that questions the value of the sharing economy in terms of shifting the logic away from sharing for the common good towards the economic opportunity of exploiting the discourse of sharing as a sustainable practice. For example, Martin (2016, p. 149) goes so far as to say that the sharing economy has been successfully reframed by regime actors as a purely economic opportunity.

The ideological narratives were consistent in promoting individual freedom and social progress to achieve a more sustainable adventure tourism industry that protects the environment of rural adventure destinations and helps local communities to thrive and remain vibrant. The sustainability narrative is a common way for new exchange platforms to gain legitimacy. However, sustainability aspects are often forgotten over time as platforms mature (Geissinger et al., 2019). On the Dawn platform, although the sustainability goals were explicitly narrated, there was a lack of strategies for both acting on and achieving these goals, and over time they got lost in favour of profit-making.

The ideological narrative of shared identity was mainly linked to male bonding through sport. It can be argued that sustainability has little to do with a narrow identity that excluded groups of potential adventurers other than those targeted by the platform. Although these two narratives are seemingly contradictory, they can be understood as different ways of mobilising a particular group of people who are seen as essential to the success of the business. Both Dawn’s digital platform and social media targeted a community of white male adventurers by featuring almost exclusively images of white, young, and middle-aged men. Women were absent from the development process of Dawn, both as employees and as a target audience for the promotion of Dawn. Furthermore, the entrepreneur and his colleagues did not mention female guides, instructors, skiers, or surfers during interviews. Relying on a homogeneous community of users and collaborators risks limiting the success of sharing platforms, as their capacity depends on their ability to attract many users.

Although the narratives performed by Adrian and his team initially focused on the pursuit of the common good, profit-making became increasingly dominant. Thus, ideologically contradictory narratives were performed to establish the platform, reflecting the contradictory logic of the sharing business model (Besharov & Smith, 2014). These narratives are linked to the ideology of the radically free market economy and, at the same time, to an ideology based on altruistic and egalitarian values that aim to promote social change and sustainable modes of production and consumption. Paradoxically, the narratives underline the fact that the sharing platform is accessible to a limited group of people, i.e., the insiders of the adventure sports community, albeit embedded in a discourse of an inclusive sharing economy.

Our findings on how different ideological narratives were enacted in the process of developing a sharing platform in adventure tourism may be common to other sharing platforms. In the case of Dawn, the ideological orientation of community values and beliefs was particularly emphasised, leading to an exclusive and shared identity that attracted too few users to allow the platform to expand.

6. Conclusions

This paper advances the understanding of the processes by which sharing business models evolve over time by situating them within the ideological narratives that shape their emergence. These narratives are enacted at different phases of the development process and reflect different and sometimes conflicting logics. While there is scholarly interest in sharing business models (e.g., Constantiou et al., 2017; Ritter & Schanz, 2019; Öberg, 2023), less attention has been devoted to the discursive and ideological efforts that underpin their evolution. Our findings highlight the critical role of the ideological embeddedness of sharing business models in shaping them. Arguably, all business models are, to some extent, narrated into being; however, this paper argues that sharing business models are particularly susceptible to being narratively performed, as they are linked to strong ideologies of sharing, inclusion, and sustainability. These ideological claims are not only used to establish engagement and legitimacy but also serve to build distinct brand identities to differentiate the platform. As such, the evolution of sharing business models cannot be fully understood without examining the ideological frameworks and narratives that frame them. Further research is needed to explore the narratives shaping sharing business models, examining how various ideologies interact to influence their emergence and trajectory.