© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

Recently, I attended a talk by Russell Belk who is arguably the most authoritative figure in research on the relationship between possessions and people. Belk’s work, beginning with his classic paper of 1988 marks the beginning of an era of understanding what our possessions, the objects we own, mean to us, and how they mark our “extended selves.” In this article, I discuss ideas of sharing, owning, the sharing economy of today, and what all of this means for digital goods.

With advances in research, our understanding of possessions gained clarity and became a topic worth studying. Belk has done work on other topics such as materialism, sharing, gift giving, possessions in the digital world, and a variety of cross cultural research. Among all these topics, Belk chose to talk about sharing and materialism, among others. Some of his thoughts are worth repeating, analyzing, and criticizing, hence this article.