12 The Rise of the Sharing Economy
capacities to act and intervene in globalizing changes (Findlay 2004). The
“strong wind of ‘market fundamentalism’ ”—or faith in unregulated markets
as the solution to social and economic problems—“has blown from New York
to Washington, deeply influencing the approach to economic policy around
the world” (Borzaga and Galera 2012, 3)—“blowing old and new pollutants
while whipping the elements into new threats to human structures, economic
activity, and human life,” intensifying precarity and pitting short-term extrac-
tive opportunity against long-term, cooperative policy (Findlay and Findlay
2013, 814). Proponents of market fundamentalism characterize climate
change and ecological interests as impediments to economies and social jus-
tice as a luxury we can no longer afford. They reduce “the plurality of eco-
nomic and entrepreneurial models to a single, reductive logic” and multiple
bottom lines to “a single financial one.” In the process they distract “attention
from human responsibility for the economic meltdown” and either discount
or appropriate “to their own competitive purposes cooperation and multiple
bottom lines” (Findlay 2012, 2; on Walmart, e.g., see Monllos 2015).
A key instrument in naturalizing and entrenching these “strong winds” and
big stories is the so-called hidden curriculum (Jackson 1968; Margolis 2001),
or what Smith (1990) calls “relations of ruling.” This invisible infrastructure
within educational institutions teaches dominant norms and values without
ever acknowledging its biases. It appears so natural as to remain powerfully
hidden in plain view despite being outed almost 50 years ago. And the mythi-
cal liberal sovereign subject, a rights bearer purportedly unmarked by gender,
race, or class, continues to maintain the status quo (and the racial hierarchies
on which it depends) despite learning across the disciplines about changing,
adaptable human behavior, and economic choices (Schor 2010; Schulte-
Tenckhoff 2015). The hidden curriculum similarly keeps hidden the holistic
thinking of Indigenous peoples who respect the vitality, equality, and interde-
pendence of all (human and nonhuman alike) and live in harmony with “All
our relations,” or miyowicehtowin—having or possessing good relations, the
laws concerning good relations (Cardinal and Hildebrandt 2000, 14–16). It
keeps hidden the ways that such thinking might yield new forms of sustain-
ability by recognizing the full range of relations on which we depend (Findlay
and Findlay 2012, 2013).
It is ironic that the hidden curriculum has for so long actively supported
ignorance in the interests of domination and exploitation (Sullivan and Tuana
2007), while marginalizing knowledges and resources so critical to sustain-
able communities and economies. Globalizing modernity’s wasteful ways frag-
menting, individualizing, and privatizing knowledges and relegating some
knowledges to the dustbin of history have been well documented by Bauman
(2004). Such waste persists even as in 2012 there were three times more co-
operative members than individual shareholders worldwide: 328 million di-
rect shareholders compared with 1 billion member owners of cooperatives
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