Organization-Sponsored Sharing Platforms: Managing the Dialectics of Conflicting Institutional Logics

Using institutional logics as our analytical lens, we gain insights into a new class of technology, namely organization-sponsored ridesharing platforms. We classify this new technology class as a nesting of peer-to-peer (P2P) and business-to business (B2B) business models, within an organizationally bounded space. Importantly, each of these layers in this new B2B2P2P sharing model is associated with a different institutional logic – namely market, hierarchy and clan – that are at odds with each other. Drawing on dialectic theories of management, we analyze data collected from Zimride, a ridesharing platform used primarily by universities, to identify the tensions that manifest themselves in the B2B2P2P sharing model, how they relate to one another across the layers of the nested model, and how the users of this sharing model deal with these tensions.