Analysis of the evolution of the sharing economy towards sustainability. Trends and transformations of the concept

Abstract

The Sharing Economy has been emerged in recent years as a trend with high growth potential by showing itself to be an innovative model for creating products, services and relationships based on sustainable consumption. The Sharing Economy has emerged as a multidimensional and multidisciplinary concept, which initially only covered areas of the economy and social sciences and which later experienced growth in business, urban planning, tourism, information technology and digital science (industry 4.0) or engineering. This has transformed its development from an economic opportunity to a form of decentralised, equitable and sustainable economy with the creation of new initiatives and companies that have reduced environmental impact by decreasing the use of natural resources. The present study aims to evaluate the evolution of the discourse and the way research has progressed in this incipient sphere of collaborative consumption up to the present day by means of an in-depth analysis of scientific production through bibliometrics and network analysis techniques with the VOSviewer© software and the complete database of publications obtained from the Web Of Science (2152 publications). It also includes the detailed examination of the most relevant bibliographic reviews on Sharing Economics, as well as the main publications on bibliometric analysis. The article evaluates key words, sources, authors, citations, organizations, categories, and countries using various bibliometric techniques. Finally, in the results 5 clusters of thematic categories are obtained where a change in the trend of publications towards the field of clean and green technology is reflected, forming in recent years an agglutinating nucleus of all the disciplines in which “sustainability” acts as the backbone of scientific production. This is a positive development in cleaner production, where institutions and authors from the USA and Europe have risen to the top of the ranking of publications and impact. At a global level, the current commitment to research for the development of accessible, equitable and sustainable products and services is reflected.