Entrepreneurship in the sharing And Gig economy 

Agent-based modelling, housing markets and Airbnb tourism

The paper written with Evgueni Vinogradov and Bjørnar Karlsen Kivedal in 2020 analyses the link between housing-market regulation and the growth of Airbnb, based upon Norwegian Airbnb listings and an agent-based modelling simulation approach. 

This article was published in "Tourism Management" (ABS JG 2021 4 stars).

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S026151771930202X 

Stressed or Happy - or Both? Nuancing Gig Workers' Experiences with Platform Work 

With Linda Weidenstedt, Eva-Lisa Palmtag and Mark Cropley, I have published this article that refines the understanding of gig workers' experiences by showing that stress and job satisfaction can be parallel rather than mutually exclusive outcomes of gig work. By 'gig work' we mean in this article piecemeal work using digital apps and platforms as part of the job. Using international survey data (N=2,385), we examine in the article how demographic factors, socioeconomic circumstances, and work intensity are associated with both stress and job satisfaction of gig workers. Our results show that gig work can be both stressful and satisfying, with high work pace and physical activity enhancing satisfaction without increasing stress. These findings challenge the assumption that by default precarity leads to dissatisfaction, and they underscore the need to measure both stress and satisfaction of gig work. The exploratory study contributes to extant research on platform work by offering a nuanced perspective on gig workers' well-being, with implications for platform design and policy to improve working conditions in the gig economy.

The article was published in "Economic and Industrial Democracy" (ABS JG 2021 3 stars).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X251366931 

Betwixt and between: Triple liminality and liminal agency in the Swedish gig economy

With Linda Weidenstedt, Andrea Geißinger and Nabeel Nazeer, I have published an article (in 2023) on the experienced liminality of migrant gig workers in Swedish food delivery. The paper analyses qualitative interviews and informal conversations with food delivery workers in Stockholm through the lens of the territory-place-scale-network (TPSN) framework as developed by Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Martin Jones. It finds that Swedish migrant gig workers are challenged to deal with triple liminality regarding their work identities, workplaces and work organisation through platforms. Focusing on liminality as a central aspect of gig work, the paper further finds that despite having little worker agency, some of the study participants engage in what is called liminal agency, that is actively pursuing possibilities for progress in uncertain states of in-betweenness. By unpacking the liminal dynamics that especially migrant food delivery riders are confronted with in their daily working lives, this study contributes to the debate on the migrant gig economy, the spatial turn in organisation studies and efforts from human geography to understand agency in precarious gig work. 

The article was published in "Environment and Planning A (EPA)" (ABS JG 2021 3 stars).

https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231172984 

Individual-contextual determinants of entrepreneurial service provision in the sharing economy

With Martin Thomas Falk, Mehtap Aldogan Eklund and Evgueni Vinogradov, I published an article in 2021 on the nature of service provision in the platform-based collaborative economy from the perspective of entrepreneurship theories. The article explores the individual and contextual determinants of service provision through digital platforms in two main sectors of the collaborative economy, transportation and accommodation. It provides a first conceptual introduction of these activities and their nature for the existing entrepreneurship research. 

The article was published in "International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research" (ABS JG 2021 3 stars).

https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-09-2020-0585 

Professionalisation and performance of Airbnb hosts in rural regions

This paper - coauthored by Sarah Beth Mitchell, Karol Jan Borowiecki, Evgueni Vinogradov, Guðrún Þóra Gunnarsdóttir, Jie Zhang, Susanne Gretzinger and Vera Vilhjálmsdóttir (in 2024) - explores the professionalisation and performance aspects of Airbnb hosts in rural regions in Denmark, Iceland, and Norway. Based on the professionalisation of hosts, which represents a proxy for the scale of their entrepreneurial engagement, the host landscape in the rural regions is investigated, resulting in different host profiles, including individual single- and multiple-listing hosts, and small and large tourism companies. The paper subsequently estimates the service quality performance of Airbnb hosts in relation to their professionalisation in rural regions through a u-shaped relationship, with the professionalisation influencing the performance evaluation of the hosts by the users. This twofold empirical analysis provides both a more nuanced and more comprehensive description of the nature and scale of Airbnb host engagement in rural regions, and points to the vast entrepreneurial opportunities for private households and companies on the platform. 

The paper was published in "International Journal of Hospitality Management" (ABS JG 2021 3-stars). 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2023.103680 

The impact of Airbnb hosts on Arctic local economies: Consumption patterns, entrepreneurship and sustainability

Funding by Nordregio/NAPA Arctic Cooperation Programme 2021-2023 (Grant no. A81201)

With a team of researchers from the University of Southern Denmark, Centre for Regional and Tourism Research Denmark, Icelandic Tourism Research Centre and Nordland Research Institute Norway, a funded research project investigated how Airbnb hosts contribute to the development of sustainable tourism in rural Nordic regions of Denmark, Norway and Iceland. Since the number of Airbnb hosts has been increasing in peripheries over the past decade, attracting tourists as an alternative source of income and opportunities for local entrepreneurship, Airbnb-based tourism can have both positive and negative effects on local economies. The project applied an empirical mixed-methodology research approach to study this topic. 

Link to the final project report on ResearchGate

Link to a book chapter published in 2024 from this project