Setting an Example for the “Sharing Economy” Category: The Double-Edged Sword of Exemplars

In their efforts to tackle grand challenges, social movements often create and promote a category infused with moral values and purpose. Examples serve as rhetorical devices in shaping and defining a category’s meaning. However, the role of examples in categorical dynamics has been largely overlooked in existing research. In our study, we use qualitative research methods to examine the sharing economy category between 2004 and 2019, focusing on how the category’s initiating social movement and the press use examples during the phases of category obscurity, growth, and decline. Our findings reveal that the social movement utilizes rhetorical practices such as “example proliferation,” “example concentration,” and “exemplar vilification.” We delve into the motivations behind these strategies and their outcomes, analyzing their impact on the actions of both the press and the social movement and the resulting shifts in the category’s meanings. We underscore the double-edged nature of exemplars—the most salient and prominent examples—highlighting their capacity to mainstream a category while also potentially steering it toward undesired changes, and, ultimately, its decline. This has profound implications for the category’s usefulness in addressing grand challenges.