Introducing the Airbnb Citizen

Chapter 2 introduced some of the rhetorical claims made by platform businesses and their allies, and explored the way in which platforms and change are presented in public debates. Chapter 3 reviewed the literature on processes and trajectories of struggle around regulation, showing commonalities across a range of different platforms worldwide, especially in the tactics used by platforms. Analysis of platform regulation regularly notes the combination of rhetorical tactics with the mobilisation of users and allies. Chapter 4 explored the forms through which narratives and mobilisation are combined through users and allies of platform who help platforms pursue political claims beneficial to platforms around regulation and legitimacy, identifying four approaches. This chapter explores the combination of rhetoric and mobilisation, and the different forms of platform power, deployed in the most well-resourced example of platform-based corporate grassroots lobbying in the world to date, Airbnb Citizen.

The chapter has two main sections. First it discusses the creation of the Airbnb Citizen – the core ways in which Airbnb displaces itself by claiming to represent a community, while training a carefully constructed community to represent the business. It does this by exploring how prospective landlord activists are selected, and the processes through which they are subsequently recruited, trained and mobilised. It finds that participation in Airbnb's political campaigns and the composition of Home Sharing Clubs is carefully curated, with commercial landlords on the platform, the most controversial and accounting for a majority of listings, excluded, apparently in order to present a more benign impression of the company. These findings contrast with Airbnb's public account of the composition of Airbnb's campaigns, which suggested an organic and highly diverse ‘community’ movement of Airbnb stakeholders. The findings also illustrate the backstage processes of recruitment, political training, mobilisation and coordination that underpin some of the successes that lean platforms have enjoyed in navigating the regulatory landscape.

The second part of the chapter looks at the activists and mobilisations organised in front groups known as ‘Host Clubs’ or ‘Home Sharing Clubs’ (synonymous, generally referred to as Host Clubs hereafter), and enquires about the relationship these activists, campaigns and groups have with the company.

The Sharing Economy reflects the crisis

While debates about the politics of digital platforms are crucial for employment rights and housing, they also concern legitimacy, corporate power and contemporary capitalism. That is because of the context for the emergence of lean platforms, their claims about their relationship to the global financial crisis, and the difficulties in their regulation and governance so far. This chapter is about the context to the emergence of lean platforms, and platform rhetoric, the constellation of stories, categories and semantic games used by platforms and their allies to frame and shape reality in a way intended to shape regulation through processes and trajectories that are described in Chapters 3, 4 and 5.

Since the 2007/2008 crisis, and arguably since the alter-globalisation movement, economic orthodoxies and common sense around neoliberalism have become increasingly scrutinised and challenged. The financial crash and its main drivers, especially the sub-prime mortgage boom in the United States, is widely regarded to have resulted from the quintessentially neoliberal deregulation of banking sectors, especially the 1999 repeal of elements of the US Glass-Steagal Act, which once again permitted financial institutions to engage in banking alongside riskier investment operations (Krugman 2008, Stiglitz 2010, Aalbers 2016). The subsequent bailouts of banks at the expense of populations, through public service austerity, and the recessions that followed, led to wage stagnation, underemployment, price rises and a global wave of outrage around the compromising of democracy, peaking between 2010 and 2013 in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and the Occupy movements (Brannen et al 2020, Bevins 2023).

The rise of new digital platforms was made possible by the neoliberal response to a crisis of neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, platforms presented themselves as part of the answer. Platforms, it was argued, were part of an alternative economic model that opposed incumbent corporate elites with a collaborative and communitarian alternative (see the section on ‘The rise and fall of the Sharing Economy category’).

Several wider transformations of capitalism and digital technology are helpful in contextualising the emergence, significance and power of platform businesses.

This is a story about the power of grassroots movements, narratives and modern corporations to change the way everyday life is provisioned and governed. From 2008, a new wave of Silicon Valley corporations refined a ‘platform’ business model, providing digitally mediated versions of a number of existing services. Several companies, including Airbnb and Uber, and a host of allies, advocates and alternative economic projects, created a story about a new economy with ‘sharing’ and ‘collaboration’ at its centre. These lean platforms, holding few assets but playing a coordinating role between workers, owners and consumers, started to be presented as an answer to the problems of contemporary neoliberal economies.

Yet it has become widely recognised that the predicted benefits of the platform economy are not materialising. This book charts the rise and fall of the morally laden narratives generated early on in terms such as the ‘Collaborative’ or ‘Sharing Economy’, identifying the popular stories told about platforms and the dynamics of change associated with them. It explores the growing context of growing resistance to platforms and attempts to transform or regulate them, and it analyses and theorises the tactics platform businesses use to try to consolidate their advantages.

In doing so, the book works with a unique set of interviews with ex-workers of the lean platform business Airbnb, who were responsible for designing and implementing platform political strategies, particularly around the political mobilisation of platform users and allies, platform power. The book brings in a supplementary body of statements and documents which demonstrate how platform political tactics work in practice. The book also makes use of such public documents and statements such as those of Airbnb's former Head of Global Community, Douglas Atkin, who in his role spearheaded the company's political strategy to avoid regulation: the mass mobilisation of thousands of landlords since 2010, deploying ‘Community Organisers’ trained in electoral campaigning, non-governmental organisations and charities. An excerpt from a speech by Atkin characterises the combination of rhetorical and mobilisation tactics at the centre of platform politics:

The corporate political activity of lean platforms in context

As discussed, the stories platform businesses tell about themselves, their users and their own corporate political activity creates confusion about their power, their relationship to neoliberal capitalism and the process by which they have grown. This chapter presents a contrasting perspective to these narratives, collecting and reviewing the empirical evidence of the conflicts and struggles that have accompanied processes of transformation, and identifying the common political processes and tactical approaches used. It shows that the form that platform businesses eventually take in any given context depends on interactions and conflicts between platforms, other businesses, lobbyists, states, investors, critical social movements, non-corporate platform alternatives, media, and the users and customers of platforms. These struggles are still ongoing and are at very different stages in different places.

A range of business tactics have been deployed to protect the legislative and fiscal advantages lean platforms hold over traditional hotels, taxi firms and other competitors. They include many forms that are recognisable from the extant literature on corporate political activity (for example, Katic and Hillman 2023), including private lobbying; lawsuits, appeals and legal threats; refusal to follow local laws; threats to leave a jurisdiction; withholding data required to enforce laws; incentivising law-breaking to prevent enforcement; offers of collaboration, negotiation and self-regulation; ‘business model adaptation’ involving linguistic and legal contortions to avoid their business falling under certain regulatory frameworks; ‘venue shifting’ to get local policies overturned by other authorities; framing and messaging tactics to shape public perception and influence law-makers; public relations (PR) strategies that involve the mobilisation of users or allies in order to shape public perception and influence law-makers, consultations or referenda; PR strategies to create mobilisation arrangements with allies; rapid expansion or ‘blitzscaling’, using heavy incentives to ensure popular buy-in from users (introductory offers for customers and drivers, hosts and other intermediaries); and delaying tactics – whether legal or relating to negotiation, which also allow the company to consolidate its position as a normal part of life and the economy in the society in question, making further disruption by the state less attractive a prospect.

Three arguments about platform politics

Platform politics shapes how and to what extent platform businesses are adopted, rejected, reasserted and reimagined in our societies. The key tactics by which platforms pursue their aims, it is argued, are very distinctive, yet they are also multifaceted, bearing their own histories in corporate and civic culture. Important commonalities link platforms and contexts in the use of these tactics – across ride-hailing and short-term lettings platforms there are similarities in their approaches to avoid regulation, for example, and there are many parallels with what we know about other types of platform (Zuboff 2019). Lean platforms practise a common repertoire of contention when seeking to avoid regulation. That means that understanding platform politics can help policy makers, activists and citizens learn about contemporary modes of corporate influence, understand where they came from, and challenge them in the future. This final chapter of the book reflects on these arguments, their implications, contributions to our knowledge, and the areas where further research is needed. It also discusses the possible futures of lean platforms and their approach to governance.

The foundations and inspiration of this book are the growing critiques of digital platforms, discussions of platform regulation and the future of platforms, and the identification of new corporate political tactics. Adding to this work, Platform Politics provides the first book-length study of the political struggles shaping digital platforms. It also analyses the conflicts around more than one platform business, allowing for a review of the strategies of lean platforms across several sectors. This reveals the similarities and differences in platform tactics across platforms, emphasising a contentious repertoire of three broad and overlapping moments around incursion, politicisation and enforcement, each made up of several overlapping practices. This is the topic of the first main argument of the book.

While comparisons of particular platform businesses across contexts and cities have been very fruitful, these commonalities across different types of lean platforms suggest that there would be value in comparing their tactics and trajectories further, and at different scales. Future work might explore how far other businesses follow this shared repertoire, and whether there are exceptions or patterns of geographical variation. Another promising area to explore would be the variation in responses by states and communities to similar platform tactics, and patterns in the outcomes.

How new is platform power?

This chapter examines how corporate grassroots lobbying (CGL) is employed by lean platforms in platform power: the mobilisation of users and allies towards political outcomes by platform corporations. Platform power, it is argued, takes four main forms, each of which combine and innovate around existing practices. CGL has become an important tool for businesses in the new digital economy to shape regulation and influence public opinion, and this chapter seeks to explain its origins and what forms it takes. At the end of the chapter the wider political and economic context in which platform power should be understood, and its wider implications, are described. Here, it is argued that platform power, among other contemporary trends, extends the dynamic in which corporate institutions and logics increasingly dominate political as well as social life. At the same time, it is argued, platform power is simultaneously reactive to, and dependent on, the power and legitimacy of grassroots collective action. Platforms mobilise their users and allies in order to neutralise critical and increasingly successful social movements, but the success of platform power in generating corporate counter-movements has so far been only partial. Before that, I argue against literature which has suggested that digital platforms have their own entirely distinctive political logics, and that platform power is a new phenomenon (Pollman and Barry 2016 , Culpepper and Thelen 2020). Rather, platform power combines new elements with several established practices, especially drawing from the tradition of corporate political organising. These practices have been innovated on in five ways, in particular around platforms’ particular connection with their users and their intensive collection of data, and the adoption and further professionalisation of civil society practices such as community organising.

Corporate political mobilisation as a political strategy of firms is mainly practised in North America, and has taken various forms historically (see Walker and Rea 2014). When it involves ordinary people or citizens it is generally referred to using the concept of CGL. Until recently, it relied on the outsourcing of grassroots political action by corporations, trade associations, some advocacy organisations and electoral campaigning to third parties, which became increasingly common in the United States through the development of public affairs consultancies during the 1980s (Walker 2014).

This chapter summarizes the book’s main argument and places it in the broader context of the literatures on party building, electoral mobilization, and partisanship. It outlines the book’s broad theoretical approach that combines insights from social psychology (in particular, drawing on social identity and self-categorization theory) with a historical institutionalist framework.

The Introduction sets the scene by describing the relevance of the idea of a symbiotic relationship between competition and democracy in the history of competition law and the contemporary policy debate. It identifies the gap in the literature, explains the research question and the purpose of the book, and presents the argument of the book in a nutshell. It starts with the observation that the idea of a link between competition and democracy is a recurrent theme in US and EU competition law. However, existing scholarship has so far struggled to clearly explain what the relationship between competition and democracy actually consists of. This knowledge gap is filled by this book which provides a clear, conceptually sound, and surprising answer to this research question. It argues that the idea of competition–democracy nexus is grounded in a republican understanding of liberty as non-domination which can be traced back to the political thought of the Ancient Roman republic and fundamentally differs from our contemporary negative concept of liberty as non-interference. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate how this republican concept of liberty explains the idea of a competition–democracy nexus in US and EU competition law.

When India became independent, the main livelihoods in this region, as in the rest of the country, were based on land. But unlike most other regions of India, a significant and relatively more prominent part of the economy (half or more of the domestic product) was urban and non-agricultural. Non-agricultural did not mean industrial. True, the processing of some commercial products involved non-mechanised factories. Alappuzha (Alleppey) had emerged as a hub of coir production and Quilon (Kollam) of cashew. Some isolated large, mechanised factories employed hundreds of people in one place in chemicals, rayon, paper and a few other lines. Thus, Aluva (Alwaye) had textiles, fertilisers, aluminium, glass and rayon industries, and Ernakulam oil and soap industries. There were also tea estates in the hills. A concentration of plantation businesses in rubber and spices occurred to the east of Kottayam. But collectively, these formed a smaller group than trade and the financing of marketing, which dominated the landscape of non-agricultural employment. All major towns lived mainly on trade and informal banking. Trichur and Kottayam were mostly service-based towns, with a concentration of banks, colleges and rich churches.

Over one-third of the workforce was in industry, trade, commerce and finance. In most large states of India, the percentage was 20–35. The exceptions were the industrialised states of West Bengal and Maharashtra, where factory-based large-scale industrial firms concentrated. Again, a contrast emerged with the rest of India. Most local businesses were small-scale, semi-rural and household enterprises, whereas non-agricultural enterprises in the rest of India were mainly urban.

Further, industrialisation almost everywhere else signified a sharp inequality between the countryside and the city. The former was trapped in low-yield farmland producing grains for subsistence or local markets, and the latter experienced growth of high-wage jobs. In the state, that distance was narrower. The presence of tree crops and their industrial processing made for a narrower gap between the rural and the urban. Many of the landholders were also owners of estates growing tree crops. Agriculture was not necessarily low yield nor subsistence oriented. In this way, agriculture and non-agriculture, rural and urban came much closer here compared with India.