A Multidisciplinary Account of the Sharing Economy in BRICS Countries: Multiple disciplinary perspectives on platforms, markets, society, and sustainability

This study treats the BRICS sharing economy as a multidisciplinary research problem. Platform markets in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have to be understood through economics, management, information systems, public policy, labour research and sustainability science. The evidence is a Web of Science corpus of 443 records, mapped with VOSviewer. Three conclusions follow. First, the topic has several disciplinary homes: business and management, environmental sciences, sustainability, tourism and transport sources all carry weight in the co-citation and source-coupling maps. Second, closeness in a network shows shared references or shared terms and does not show integrated theory. Third, country comparison needs attention to institutional and sectoral settings, because the international co-authorship network is centred on China and the USA, with the other BRICS members in smaller roles. The paper proposes a multidisciplinary evidence matrix that links concepts, methods, settings and outcomes, and suggests testing it against country-level platform cases.