From the Trust Update team and Alex Zarifis
Here we see ‘The dance of life’ by Edvard Munch. Someone arranged when this event would happen, what the music would be, but nevertheless the two people had to choose to dance together. If the context was different in some way would they still chose to dance together?
Research exploring the language of the sharing economy (Zarifis et al. 2019), looked at how we build trust and reduce privacy concern on Airbnb in German and English. The findings indicate that the landlord does not usually reduce privacy concern but leaves this to the platform. The findings also illustrate that language has a role in the interaction, but it is limited, and the platform norms and habits are more influential. Language plays a role primarily in three ways:
- Firstly, in the way the landlord expresses the benefits of the vacancy,
- Secondly, the terms, conditions and fines and
- Lastly the landlord’s self-presentation in the personal profiles.
‘The dance of life’ Edvard Munch
The expansion of the sharing economy has spread around the world. The SE is growing in popularity despite several challenges such as insufficient regulation, legal restrictions and personal information privacy breaches. The push of SE champions such as Airbnb and Uber is met by an equally strong pull from consumers across the world. The differences between consumers from different geographic locations and cultures, who speak different languages and have different habits, do not appear to be a major challenge to the diffusion of SE models.
SE champions like Airbnb provide the online platform for the sharing. These platforms fulfil some functions, like processing the payment, but leave others, like describing the room, to landlords that want to share.
The person that wants to rent the room must have a sufficiently high trust and sufficiently low privacy concern to engage. The individual must provide personal information to book the flat, but they are also vulnerable during their stay, in several ways including video surveillance. It is clear that the individual’s privacy concerns are also elevated and compounded in the SE because of the physical privacy risks that are added to information risks. Therefore, it is necessary to explore trust and privacy together.
As the platform stops short of offering all the information and providing all the functionality, the landlord must build trust and reduce privacy concern. Despite the role of the platform in bringing the two sides together, the renter will stay in a room of a stranger, not an organization with a recognized brand and reputation. There are higher risks and likelihood of distrust than a traditional hotel.
In addition to bringing the two sides together, the platform such as Airbnb, takes several steps to increase the limited trust such as making reviews from previous renters available. Nevertheless, the landlord must also reduce the feeling of risk, increase trust and reduce privacy concerns in the way they communicate the information about themselves and what they are offering. The landlord is an individual the renter has not met before and not an established organization with a recognized brand, so they only have a few words and pictures to achieve this.
Users in different countries have similar, if not the same, experiences on the Internet using popular global platforms. It is easy to neglect that different languages are still used, and they influence the interaction differently. The language used shapes the way a message is coded and decoded based on standardized language norms and culture.
Nevertheless, the role of language and linguistics in information systems, and especially in the SE, has not been sufficiently covered. Therefore, the aim of that research was to explore what the trust building methods are and how privacy concerns are reduced in the SE, in German and English, using the case of Airbnb. Understanding how collaborative consumers build trust also answers the question whether there are differences in building trust and reducing privacy concern in these two languages. The room descriptions and the profiles of the landlords offering their properties in Germany in German and in England in English were contrasted.
The division of responsibility for building trust and reducing privacy concern between the platform and the landlord were clarified. The landlord focuses on building trust through their property description and profile while the platform supports trust and decreases privacy concerns.
Furthermore, the linguistic approaches to building trust and reducing privacy concern were identified. For building trust these are:
- The level of formality
- Distance and proximity
- Emotiveness and humour
- Being assertive, including passive aggressive, but avoiding anger
- Conformity to the platform language style and terminology and lastly
- Setting boundaries
The practical implications are the following: Firstly, there appears to be limited benefit in adapting the platform for Germany and England because of the limited role of language compared to the platform norm in communication. It appears that the efforts of the platform to reduce risk in several ways, including the aggregated information they collect, are effective.
In terms of building trust there are practical implications for the landlord and the platform. The constituent participants of the SE should be clear about where the other participant is building trust effectively and where they need to build trust. An example is that the landlord should build trust and reduce privacy concern for physical privacy, while privacy of financial information related to the payment can be covered by the platform. It is important for platforms, landlords and the related institutions to support trust transference. For example, the landlord aligns their message to that of Airbnb.
To conclude, using the metaphor of the painting ‘the dance of life’ we can say that the platform has choreographed this dance sufficiently between the participants that different languages have a limited influence on the outcome. Whether they were speaking in English or German the man in the blue suit and the lady in the red dress would say similar things before agreeing to dance together.
References
Zarifis A., Ingham R. & Kroenung, J. (2019). Exploring the language of the sharing economy: Building trust and reducing privacy concern on Airbnb in German and English, Cogent Business & Management, vol.6, iss.1, pp.1-15. Available from (open access): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311975.2019.1666641