Paolo Parigi

On the Sharing Economy

Sharing, caring, and profit with Juliet B. Schor, Edward T. Walker, Caroline W. Lee, and Paolo Parigi and Karen Cook.

Disenchanting the World: The Impact of Technology on Relationships

We explore the impact of technology on the strength of friendship ties. Data come from about two millions ties that members of CouchSurfing—an international hospitality organization whose goal is to promote travelling and friendship between its members—developed between 2003 and 2011 as well as original and secondary ethnographic data. The community, and the data available about its members, grew exponentially during our period of analysis, yet friendships between users tended to be stronger in the early years of CouchSurfing, when the online reputation system was still developing and the whole network was enmeshed in considerable uncertainty. We argue that this case illustrates a process of disenchantment created by technology, where technology increases the ease with which we form friendships around common cultural interests and, at the same time, diminishes the bonding power of these experiences.

The political party as a network of cleavages: Disclosing the inner structure of Italian political parties in the seventies

Abstract Building on two established perspectives on the political party, in this paper we view the party as an organized network of formal and informal relationships between individuals that reflects national cleavages. We test this interpretation using two Italian parties of the 1970s that played major roles in shaping political and social life of the country: the Christian Democrats, or DC, and the Communists, or PCI. The 1970s saw the culmination of the DC and PCIs two-party dominance of the Italian state. Further, it was during this same period that the economic and social contradictions of Italys tumultuous post-World War II process of industrialization became apparent, making social cleavages easy to grasp. We use cosponsoring of bills between parliamentary members as a measure of formal and informal relationships within each party. We deem this appropriate in the context of a pure proportional electoral system and highly polarized audiences. Data comes from the lower chamber of the Parliament during the Sixth Legislative cycle (1972–1977). We use HLM to model dyadic interactions between MPs and distinguish between repeated cosponsoring of bills (strong ties) and single occurrences of cosponsoring (weak ties). Our results show that within each party, national cleavages significantly increased the likelihood of strong ties but were not relevant in structuring weak ties. We conclude that the party has an internal structure made of a network of MPs informed by external social cleavages and held together by the common goal of being reelected.

Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy

In the last two decades, the political opportunity structure (POS) paradigm has exercised a hegemonic influence on the scholarship about mobilization. Scholars in this tradition have produced a myriad of work in various fields and with various methodologies. Nevertheless, this approach has exhausted its explicatory power, in part because the social world we live in is rather different from the world of the late 1980s when POS came to prominence. The book Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude provides a clue to how different the contemporary social world is—when mobilization occurs around ‘‘permaculture’’ and CSAs rather than against the policies of the IMF. The edited collection that Juliet B. Schor and Craig J. Thompson curated succeeds in its goal of documenting a new form of mobilization. Further, it succeeds in connecting this new type of mobilization to an older tradition of activism that used to be centered on the politicization of individuals’ private spheres. Examples of this older tradition are a Boston time bank (Chapter 3) and a small network of artisan producers in a community in southern France (Chapter 1). A growing number of scholars appear to have converged on using the label ‘‘political consumerism’’ to group together the activists discussed in the book. For sure, Schor and Thompson prefer another label to define these activists. In the introduction of the book, they talk about the ‘‘new economics of plenitude’’ with the goal of highlighting how the new forms of mobilization represent a break with usual economic activities centered on consumerism. While breaking with consumerism and mass production are key elements bringing together the claims of the different cases covered in the book, the label ‘‘new economics’’ is, in my opinion, somewhat reductive because it hides the mobilization aspect present in all these initiatives. Indeed, the mobilization of individuals as consumers is what Transition Anchorage activists are trying to achieve (see Chapter 2). New economics seems to me more of a means to achieve larger goals. Regardless, Schor and Thompson identify four elements as fundamental parts of the new economics: (1) fewer working hours that create less dependence on markets; (2) a DIY attitude that reduces alienation (to use a Marxian category); (3) a deeper appreciation for products that reduces the need to buy new things; and (4) an attention toward creating communities in order to increase control over local resources. These elements are present in all the cases covered in the book—Transition Anchorage, the producers of Aude in Provence, France, the alternative distribution systems of CSA producers, the more radical participants in a time bank in Boston. Yet, the emphasis of each movement on the four aspects listed above is different. Thus Transition Anchorage emphasizes community more than the Boston time bank, and the goal of decreasing the dependency on markets is shared more by the residents of Aude, France and the participants in the CSA than among Transition Anchorage or the raw milk activists. Interestingly, the cases in the book can also be organized with respect to their ideological commitment. Here, the fact that older forms of mobilization appear more ideological, that is, appear to have a strong anti-capitalist flair, is quite interesting because it shows the roots of the more recent mobilization, offering a fascinating link that connects anti-capitalist rhetoric to sharing-economy companies. Yet, there is another characteristic linking all of the cases described in the book. As vigorously pointed out by Douglas Holt in his chapter, all these cases are fundamentally made up of upper-middle class activists with high cultural capital, well-educated individuals that live mostly in affluent urban areas. The rhetoric, tactics, goals, and beliefs of the new economics of plenitude appeal to them more than to any other segment of the American population. In his chapter, Holt talks about a cultural chasm and uses his expertise in marketing to suggest ways for Reviews 499

From grassroots to digital ties: A case study of a political consumerism movement

New grassroots organizations that target ethical consumer choices and behavior represent a departure from traditional social movement organizations. In this article, we study the activists of one of these organizations and show that social network ties formed mainly online greatly reinforce commitment toward the goals of the movement. We suggest that online ties, that is, digital ties, are important for political consumerism movements because they create audiences for private actions. It is because of the presence of these audiences that the individual participants can reinterpret their actions into public ones. We used an online survey to collect data on the users of the Transition US social website on Ning.com. Over half of the respondents have experiences with political activism. However, their responses indicate that they are dissatisfied with traditional means of political participation (e.g. rallies) and prefer non-contentious collective actions (e.g. local gardening). Respondents perceive community organizing to be the most effective way to bring about social change, deprioritizing connections to local government. Furthermore, respondents who formed digital ties with other activists were significantly more likely than respondents who had no ties with other activists to adopt consumer changes consistent with the goals of the movement. We interpreted this finding as an indicator that digital ties share some of the characteristics of strong ties, and we explored this similarity in this article.

Spaghetti Politics: Local Electoral Systems and Alliance Structure in Italy, 1984–2001

This article describes the impact of the Italian electoral reforms of 1993 on the structure of local political alliances. The reform, which moved Italy from a purely proportional representation system to a mixed, largely majoritarian system, was designed to increase transparency, reduce corruption, limit the number of political parties, and create the conditions for a politics of interests rather than a politics of influence. Paradoxically, moving to a mixed electoral system had the opposite effect. In this article we demonstrate this impact by modeling the structure of political alliances at multiple levels (municipal, provincial and regional) of the Italian polity from 1984 to 2001.

Reputation offsets trust judgments based on social biases among Airbnb users

Significance We investigate the extent to which artificial features engineered by sharing-economy platforms, such as reputation systems, can be used to override people’s tendency to base judgments of trustworthiness on social biases, such as to trust others who are similar (i.e., homophily). To this end, we engaged 8,906 users of Airbnb as volunteers in an online experiment. We demonstrate that homophily based on several demographic characteristics is a relatively weak driver of trust. In fact, having high reputation is enough to counteract homophily. Using Airbnb data, we present evidence that the effects we found experimentally are at work in the actual platform. Lastly, we found an inverse relationship between risk aversion and trust in those with positive reputations. To provide social exchange on a global level, sharing-economy companies leverage interpersonal trust between their members on a scale unimaginable even a few years ago. A challenge to this mission is the presence of social biases among a large heterogeneous and independent population of users, a factor that hinders the growth of these services. We investigate whether and to what extent a sharing-economy platform can design artificially engineered features, such as reputation systems, to override people’s natural tendency to base judgments of trustworthiness on social biases. We focus on the common tendency to trust others who are similar (i.e., homophily) as a source of bias. We test this argument through an online experiment with 8,906 users of Airbnb, a leading hospitality company in the sharing economy. The experiment is based on an interpersonal investment game, in which we vary the characteristics of recipients to study trust through the interplay between homophily and reputation. Our findings show that reputation systems can significantly increase the trust between dissimilar users and that risk aversion has an inverse relationship with trust given high reputation. We also present evidence that our experimental findings are confirmed by analyses of 1 million actual hospitality interactions among users of Airbnb.

Simulating individual, group, and crowd behaviors in building egress

Studies of past emergency events have revealed that occupants’ behaviors, local geometry, and environmental constraints affect crowd movement and evacuation. Design of egress systems should take into consideration the social characteristics of the occupants and the unique layout of the buildings. This paper describes an agent-based egress simulation tool, SAFEgress, which is designed to incorporate human and social behaviors during evacuations. The unique feature of SAFEgress is its flexibility to model different individual, group, and crowd behavior. Simulations are conducted to examine egress performance of a museum floor plan for three scenarios: (1) expected occupancy load during peak hours; (2) group behaviors among museum visitors; and (3) measures to reduce pre-evacuation delay. By assuming different occupants’ behaviors in the simulations, engineers, designers, and facility managers can study the important human and social factors on an egress situation and, thereby, improve the design of safe egress systems and procedures.

Online Field Experiments: Studying Social Interactions in Context

Thanks to the Internet and the related availability of “Big Data,” social interactions and their environmental context can now be studied experimentally. In this article, we discuss a methodology that we term the online field experiment to differentiate it from more traditional lab-based experimental designs. We explain how this experimental method can be used to capture theoretically relevant environmental conditions while also maximizing the researcher’s control over the treatment(s) of interest. We argue that this methodology is particularly well suited for social psychology because of its focus on social interactions and the factors that influence the nature and structure of these interactions. We provide one detailed example of an online field experiment used to investigate the impact of the sharing economy on trust behavior. We argue that we are fundamentally living in a new social world in which the Internet mediates a growing number of our social interactions. These highly prevalent forms of social interaction create opportunities for the development of new research designs that allow us to advance our theories of social interaction and social structure with new data sources.

An institutional mechanism to reduce internal competition? A hypothesis about the diffusion of satellite universities in Italy

This paper sheds light on the development of a peculiar organizational form in the Italian higher education system: satellite campuses. In comparison with other European countries, the Italian system shows peculiarities in terms of differentiation and power distribution among institutional actors. Building on the idea that the opening of a satellite campus might be the result of a convergence of interests among two actors (the academic oligarchy, that is, tenured faculty members, and local governments) at the expenses of a third (the state), the paper provides evidence about a statistically significant and robust association between the level of internal ‘academic crowding’ at a university and the chances of opening one or more satellite campuses. This supports the hypothesis that the creation of satellite campuses may have been welcomed and favored by tenured professors for diverting internal competition for academic posts and preserving the distribution of power in the parent university.