“Sharing economy” and “collaborative economy” refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models, digital platforms and forms of work that characterise contemporary life: from community-led initiatives and activist campaigns, to the impact of global sharing platforms in contexts such as network hospitality, transportation, etc. Sharing the common lens of ethnographic methods, this book presents in-depth examinations of collaborative economy phenomena. The book combines qualitative research and ethnographic methodology with a range of different collaborative economy case studies and topics across Europe. It uniquely offers a truly interdisciplinary approach. It emerges from a unique, long-term, multinational, cross-European collaboration between researchers from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, geography, business studies, law, computing, information systems), career stages, and epistemological backgrounds, brought together by a shared research interest in the collaborative economy. This book is a further contribution to the in-depth qualitative understanding of the complexities of the collaborative economy phenomenon. These rich accounts contribute to the painting of a complex landscape that spans several countries and regions, and diverse political, cultural, and organisational backdrops. This book also offers important reflections on the role of ethnographic researchers, and on their stance and outlook, that are of paramount interest across the disciplines involved in collaborative economy research.

This chapter explores the nature of trust in collaborative economies: how we might see the work that trust is doing and know that it is the phenomenon of trust that we are looking at. It contrasts the work that neighbourhoods and locally focused enterprises undertake – to build trust as a valued interpersonal quality – with the legal mechanisms of the digital sharing economy, which resituate trust, shifting the focus from partners in a transaction to dependence on technology. In doing so, it identifies different roles that trust is playing and poses the question as to whether our reading of trust is subtle enough for the purposes of our designing. Along the way, it proposes a range of ethnographic forms to deepen our reading of these social aspects of transaction, including a place for our own response to new types of transaction. In doing so, it seeks to inform on the transition of groups of strangers into economies and collaborators: the ‘more-than-strangers’ of the title.