Speculating the Good Company
Sharing first insights from a discourse analysis in the field of the peer-to-peer hospitality (eg. Airbnb).
Lately, I have embarked on an analysis of the discourse of the different actors fashioning the peer-to-peer hospitality economy. The idea is to study the discourses of the various actors in order to map the power relations, and eventually answer the question that drives me here: Does the democratisation of micro-entrepreneurship fuel emancipation? or rather alienation?
“Creating millions of micro-entrepreneurs”
Platforms such as Airbnb claim to “create millions of micro-entrepreneurs”[1]. Hosts are ordinary people emancipating from the limitations of their daily lives or of their work, by venturing into the hospitality entrepreneurialism. Yet, detractors see in Airbnb’s claim the risk of creating a subjected rather than emancipated crowd.
Ordinary individuals inspired by an micro-entrepreneurial adventure are often portrayed in the media as having succumbed to the illusions of “neo-liberalism”[2]. In other words, ordinary people are transformed into “entrepreneurs of themselves”. So, how do ‘hosts’ eventually react to and work with the on going discourses of other P2P hospitality actors?
What is a discourse analysis?
An analysis of the discourse of actors in a particular field consists of compiling texts from these different actors and analysing what actors try to ‘do’ through these texts. That is, what concepts they convey, what objects they constitute and what subject positions they delimit. This mapping allows us to understand the power relations that animate this topography.
For this research, I collected texts discussing the role and identity of hosts. These texts are produced by the platform, by the local authorities, the incumbent actors, by policy makers, vacation rental operators, and by hosts.
Some initial findings…
Without going into too much of details, I would like to use this Medium post to share a puzzling perspective: speculating the Good Company.
Whether it is Airbnb, the policy makers, or the hosts themselves, it seems that everyone is stating their ability to speculate good companies. Understand ‘company’ in the sense of matching, of partnership, of association, or of being in good company.
On the other hand, the local authorities or the incumbent actors of the hotel industry argue that these peer-to-peer hospitality activities are nothing more than a parasitic form. Said otherwise, it is a rather invasive or even dubious company.
1. Facilitating efficient matchings
The platform and the policy makers all mention the efficiency of the “matching” operated by peer-to-peer platforms. This matching is done between a traveller and a local, or between a customer and an idle-capacity for example. I will not discuss the degree of efficiency here. I only wish to relate this discourse presenting the mechanics of platforms as producing value-creating associations.
By this discursive strategy, these actors rationalise the peer-to-peer phenomena as a digital extension of analog practices. Actors refer to relationship mechanisms or trust systems as a way to de-passionate de political debate. The production of good companies is presented to statistical data and efficiency ratio.
2. Imagining the XXI century company
The platform operator also develops a discourse to present itself as a type of ‘company of the future’. Although this discursive exercise took place in the year preceding its IPO, the topic was already present in the first texts of the co-founders. Trained as designers, the co-founders envision the development of this 21st century company as a ‘design challenge’.
In line with the Stakeholder Capitalism advocated in the World Economic Forum circles[3], the model of the Good Company is a question of ensuring a fair value distribution among the various stakeholders involved in the company’s activity. In the case of Airbnb, these stakeholders are the hosts, guests, employees and shareholders. The Good Company is the one that creates value for each of these stakeholders.
3. Preferring a good company over profit
Some hosts use these terms to express what drives their business. Indeed, these individual hosts (those that the platform puts forward in its discourse) develop a discourse to distinguish themselves from professional hosts (property managers who operate 10, 20, or 100 and more listings). Hosts insist on their personal investment where professionals lack it.
Indeed, individual hosts first of all report their investment in terms of time and effort. They also report on their personal investment in terms of critical thinking. Here they differ from amateur hosts who blindly follow the platform as if it were their “dating partner”. Finally, they report on their personal investment in terms of responsibility for their locality. This is to distinguish them from “horizontal hotels” that exploit a tourist location without contributing to it. Overall, hosts look for good companies and aim at presenting themselves as good companies for other actors.
4. Maintaining an independent livelihood
While the individual hosts support their personal investment as a driver for creating good companies with their guests, they also distance themselves from the platform’s narrative of compassionate sharing.
Indeed, the hosts present themselves as “real” businesses, supporting a livelihood for themselves and their relatives, away from the platform’s “social project”. Here, what the hosts produce is not the sense of “belonging for guests” that the platform expects of them, but a local and sustainable economic activity. This is presented as fair and sensible, disconnected from the feel-good narrative of the sharing economy.
Speculating the Good companies
A bit as a first draft analysis, this theme of the Good Company emerges as redundant. The Good Company as an efficient and value-creating connection. The Good Company as a forward-looking enterprise that ensures that all stakeholders share in the value created. The Good Company as a rewarding human encounter between personally invested people. The Good Company as an economic enterprise whose value serves to maintain the independence of the host.
These Good Companies are presented in opposition to the arguments of local authorities and traditional hotel actors, who caricature in their discourse these peer-to-peer hotel activities as invasive, disruptive, and parasitic to the smooth running of local activity (in terms of access to housing for residents as much as in terms of “real” job creation for example).
Concluding remarks for now
These discourses do not give reason to one or the other of the actors. On the other hand, they produce spaces for confrontation and regimes of justification, which both sides use to present their ‘value’ of these peer-to-peer practices.
This current study does not aim to define whether the value presented by each other is real or not. It seeks to clarify whether individual hosts find themselves unwillingly embroiled in an entrepreneurial experience emblematic of neo-liberal narrative.
What emerges from this Good Company speculation is that the hosts do not see themselves as entrepreneurs. Rather, they are the by-product of good companies. That is, they are not (or not only) actors who create companies (like the co-founders of Airbnb, for example), nor are they actors who are created as companies (like policy makers present hosts as micro-businesses or legal entities). Hosts construct a multiple and diverse figure of the host, produced by the innumerable repetitions of companies they experience.
In the hosts’ discourse, being a host seems to refer to repeating the speculation of good companies, in order to maintain their independence, rather than to accumulate income or skills.
Share your thoughts
This research is on-going, and would benefit from your feedbacks and comments. Feel free to use Medium tools for that, or contact me directly.
- See for instance the insightful and touching interview of Brian Chesky in the Fireside Chat back in 2013 ↩︎
- note: for the purposes of this text, I refer to the term neo-liberalism as a critique of classical liberalism, as used in Michel Foucault’s courses on the Birth of Biopolitics.↩︎
- See for instance this 2020 entry.
