Re-framing community in the platform age: analyzing organization and power in BlaBlaCar

The concept of community remains crucial in social sciences and organizational analysis. In recent years, the concept of community has become a sort of buzzword, in particular, with the rise of the so-called sharing and platform economy. This contribution asks what kinds of communities are enabled by collaborative platforms and how power is practiced within these peculiar organizations, considering them as evaluative infrastructures. The article explores these issues through the empirical analysis of one of the best-known sharing platforms (BlaBlaCar) adopting a mixed method approach. The research concludes that the analyzed case presents the main characteristics of a brand community, although it has some specific and original features. Compared to other evaluation infrastructures, in BlaBlaCar the control is more centralized and the power more legitimated, as it is considered a guarantee of security and reliability of the service which increases the loyalty to company’s brand.