Institutional work battles in the sharing economy: Unveiling actors and discursive strategies in media discourse

The rise of the sharing economy represents a disruption for incumbent organizations, institutional regimes, and society at large, causing multiple actor groups to engage in institutional work to create, maintain, and disrupt institutions. While research has provided insights into the ways in which individual actors engage in institutional work, we still lack an understanding of the dynamics between actor groups and the institutional work battles they wage in the context of the emerging sharing economy. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of the discursive institutional work during the rise of Uber and Airbnb, as represented in the news media, we first provide new insights into which actors groups engage in institutional work and which rhetoric they utilize. We inductively distill 15 discursive strategies of institutional work related to seven institutional discourses. Moreover, enfolding extant literature, we derive a taxonomy of institutional work battles and introduce the concept of cross-countering—defined as efforts to weaken, oppose, or nullify opposing discursive institutional work. Altogether, our work provides novel insights on institutional work in the sharing economy, highlights the contested nature of institutional discourses and formalizes when such contestation fosters or hinders institutional change.