Green entrepreneurship in the sharing economy: utilising multiplicity of institutional logics

The green potential of the sharing economy to exploit underutilised or redundant resources has generated a considerable interest and expectations on the part of government institutions, investors and consumers. Alongside the emerging green logic, more established economic and social logics appear to be critical for growth of sharing platforms. Applying an institutional logics approach, this paper investigates how entrepreneurial teams in the sharing economy deal with this complexity of expectations of various constituents and institutions. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews with founders and executives of UK sharing platforms, we examine the strategies used by entrepreneurial teams to utilise and combine the green logic with other institutional logics present. The results demonstrate that sharing platforms are able to grow via utilising the green logic together with the economic and social logics in a flexible manner, applying complexity reducing and complexity absorbing strategies as well as temporal adjustments in the use of logics.