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Short abstract:

To make users productive agents of Airbnb’s success, governance mechanisms are designed into the platform’s interface, affordances, and user support practices. This paper explores the material politics of how user governance is experienced and enacted on Airbnb, shaping how it frames destinations.

Long abstract:

Multi-sided platforms like Airbnb require the creation of a balance of users with competing interests, mediating their relationships by affordances that are designed to increase conversions between them. They invite those users to supply diverse inventory in the form of listings, yet standardise that content with tight classification systems. This messy convergence of opposing interests bids Airbnb to govern how users interact with the technology and each other, ultimately shaping their activities to support its business goals. Articulating the ways platforms control usership as a process of “user governance” can help make sense of the practices Airbnb employs to mediate, shape, and manage the relationships of users with each other and the platform.

This paper articulates how Airbnb’s governance is experienced, managed, asserted, and at times, challenged by the users who populate the platform with content. Taking a detailed empirical approach, I put interviews with Airbnb users (hosts) and producers (employees) in conversation with observations from time spent in the platform. I identify two facets of how hosts are governed: 1) by the technical platform and 2) by human relationship labor. A historical consideration of Airbnb’s biography contextualises these material and social mechanisms of governance as ongoing, durable processes that were embedded in the platform to meet its growth imperatives. I frame Airbnb’s governance as the practice of creating an environment in which power can be executed via processes of ordering and control, dispersed throughout and between social interactions between users and the platform.