Share

Entitlement is the line the definition draws, and it is the same line the gift entry draws from the other side. What participants are already entitled to by the norms of their community is shared, and what they have no automatic claim to is given, so sharing and giving are different operations rather than degrees of generosity. That is why sharing carries no debt and giving frequently does. The fairness criterion has two forms and Marsh offers them as alternatives rather than as a hierarchy. An equal amount, or as much as each wants or needs, which is the distinction between equality and equivalence appearing in a smaller frame. The third sentence is the one worth attending to, since it names both a physical community such as a tribe or family and an endogroup such as a corporation or state as places where sharing happens. Sharing is therefore not automatically exosocial. A corporation dividing resources among its members is sharing by this definition, and the boundary of who counts as a participant is exactly the endosocial membrane. What makes the practice healthy or not is the boundary rather than the act. The connection to allocation runs through community, defined as a group affiliated around allocation of common resources, which may be a society where allocation runs through social relationships or a trade economy where it runs through exchange.

Anthropology distinguishes sharing from gift exchange, with Marshall Sahlins mapping reciprocity from generalized to negative and demand sharing described in forager societies as an entitlement rather than a generosity. Elinor Ostrom studied the governance of commonly held resources. The sharing economy borrowed the word for what are mostly rental transactions, a usage widely criticized. Marsh's definition is close to the anthropological one and her addition is the endogroup clause, since noting that corporations and states share among their members in exactly the way families do makes the boundary rather than the practice the thing to examine.