Katy Mason

This Workshop addresses theoretical and practitioner challenges in studying management practice. Many organization, strategy and management researchers have commented on the value of the practice-based approach which, drawing on movements in social sciences more generally, has been referred to as 'the practice turn' (Whittington, 2006; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001). While practice is often conceived as bundles of activities, there are significant differences in the conceptions of activities and their connections to one another. Practices are the context of action and are themselves constituted through meaningful action. Thus the study of practices incorporates understanding activities, experiences, presentation (and re-presentation), skills, learning and the materiality of action. However, a rich theoretical background and diverse contributions create conflicting advice for managers and researchers alike. The purpose of this workshop is not to reduce this rich...

This paper uses social practice theory to explore the potential of video to generate new ‘ways of seeing’ organising and management practices. The ontological assumptions of social practice theory are invoked to suggest how organisational researchers should practice the videoing, analysing and representing of videography-based research. Examples are drawn from visual anthropology, film theory and film studies to show how inserting the camera into ordinary everyday research practices is likely to change the way we construct and represent new organisation, management and market knowledge. In so doing, we show the power of videography to generate new knowledge at an ontological level. Finally, the institutional implications for publishing and the production and circulation of knowledge are considered in light of these new researching-videoing practices, in the context of technological change in the world of video production and circulation.

This conceptual paper draws on routine theory and performativity theory to take a closer look at what happens inside organisational routines. Marketing routines are briefly discussed before considering how deepening our understanding of what happens inside the routines might be helpful in generating insights into how marketing routines become entangle with other organisational routines. We suggest that marketing routines create materials that become embedded as ostensive aspects of other organisational routines. In this way the materials generated by marketers - that describe, represent and project market and organisational action - are performative. Marketing materials end up shaping both inter-functional and inter-firm routines. Our argument is illustrated by considering how corporate identity artefacts might act as ostensive aspects of procurement routines. However our argument has much broader implications that this single setting and a research agenda is proposed.

The business press is full of examples of how firms use business models to identify and frame or resha pe new markets. Yet to-date our understanding of how busi ness models affect market-making has not received much consideration by the marketing literature. This pa pers sets out to explore the use of business models in market-making through an assimilation of the business model and market-making literatures and the examination of an illustrative case heralded in the media as the ‘way forward for market making’ ‐ Nintendo. The paper concludes by considering the implications of business models as a tool for market-making and its implications for the way we think about the growth of the firm.

The growing academic attention given to outsourcing and offshoring reflects a trend to develop offshore business models that capitalises on both the effectiveness and efficiencies that might be offered by the business network. Recent innovations in information communications technologies have made transacting and co-ordination business activities at a distance much easier. However, managers still face the challenge of working out what they can offshore and how – an issue paid little attention in the extant offshore literature. Using empirical data from an engineering firm who decides to outsource and offshore high value services for the first time, this paper examines transaction costs, transactions and firm capabilities in a way that allows us to consider the issues surrounding how managers identify and define the transactions to be carried out. Drawing on the theory of mundane transaction cost and indirect capabilities, our findings suggest that; 1) the firms in the offshore busin...

This chapter draws on the concept of orders of worth to generate understanding into how sustainable, good markets might be enabled at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). Through an ethnographic study of the efforts of a non-government organisation (NGO) to create spaces where values and value at the BoP are unearthed, articulated, contested and translated into market-making practices. Insights are generated into how interventions to make-markets in sites of extreme poverty become ‘worth the effort’. In keeping with the market studies literature, the authors explore how multiple, contested and reframed needs generate insights into the efforts (and practices) that shape orders of worth in economic life. Orders of worth are the everyday practice of social values that constitute economic value and are framed through the moral values of social worlds as these values are put to work to calculate economic value. This work provides a contribution to the market studies literature through our un...

The paper focuses on the role of expectations in shaping technological futures and their impact on how future markets are perceived. The paper foregrounds the way expectations of what new technologies might become, travel and connect actors to form powerful industrial networks that shape imagined markets. Through and analysis of professional reports, media coverage and academic publications presenting and describing expectations of the driverless car, we show how representations of expectations are used to speculate future value. Text and numbers are gathered together to create narratives that enable comparison of alternative worlds: ‘now’ and ‘the future’. Findings show that multiple narratives co-exist. While some get privileged in the media and popular press others are ignored. Some expectations sustain and become part of other actors’ narratives, making them powerful. This has a stabilizing effect on how future markets are perceived. Stabilized expectations of future markets hav...

The purpose of this research is to explore how business models are developed and put to work as frames for action in ways that innovate markets. Business models have the characteristics of frames, often being described as the configuration of multiple components or elements, surrounded by a narrative or logic that explains how the business works. We argue that business models frame action. Business model elements represent a way of framing what the business includes and manages and in this way are put to work by managers as they try to work out what to do next. This study draws upon the framing literature to understand how business models are put to work, and follows the development and use of a business model to conceptualize, mobilize and make new service-based offerings in IT services market and the industrial services market. The paper presents findings that show the chains of translation, framing and reframing of business models and their different components as they are put to...

Companies face difficult decisions regarding their management of business relationships; how much resource should they commit, when and with whom? The decisions managers make about these issues provide a ‘frame’ for their business relationships and thus a structure for their surrounding business network. Research has shown that the way problems are framed, affects the decisions managers and executives make (Bazerman 1984; Fiss and Zajac 2006; Tversky and Kahneman 1981). Similarly, the way business relationships are framed affects both the decisions and actions that companies take. Companies usually frame their business relationships by developing business models. In this way they conceptualize their relationships with other firms and aim to achieve higher levels of performance in the market place. This article describes role of business models in framing business relationships. We consider a business model as a ‘frame’ that includes structural elements, such as the selection and int...

Despite a growing understanding of market infrastructures—the rules and socio-material arrangements that enable agreements on the properties of goods, and the calculation of value, equivalence and exchange—we know little of what lies beneath the arrangements that underpin and are implicated in exchange. The socio-material lens has done much to explain how specific assemblages circulate information and goods, but has done little to explain how different infrastructures configure relations between dispersed market practices. Using the history of the development of the market for market research we show how knowledge-based infrastructures constitute markets as knowledge objects: new expertise emerged through alliances between academia, government, and private actors form a new occupation embodied in specialist agencies that set themselves up in an infrastructural relation to marketing practices. Our conceptualization of markets as knowledge objects extends extant understandings of mark...

The void between formal and informal institutionalized practices that coexist in subsistence marketplaces can render them inaccessible to subsistence consumer-merchants. We conducted an in-depth auto-ethnographic study of Novo Dia Developments, a social enterprise in Maputo, Mozambique, seeking to make the housing market accessible. Our study extends the extant understanding of the transformation of subsistence marketplaces in two ways. First, our study characterizes the institutional work done by a social enterprise to open up a subsistence marketplace. Second, our study theorizes the business models in use as a mechanism through which institutional work can be organized and performed, by 1) transforming an idea for market change into new market offerings and practices that begin to fill the void, 2) materializing and making visible other institutional voids that need to be filled, and 3) serving as a juncture at which formal and informal institutionalized practices can connect.

To implement marketization in public healthcare systems, policymakers need to situate abstract models of prescriptive practice in complex settings. Using a performativity lens we show how policy processes bring about the changes they presume. Investigating the implementation of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, and the development of a policy instruments and Clinical Commissioning Groups, we explicate the performance of a marketization programme. This longitudinal perspective on the interactions amongst the Act’s aims, the multiple constituencies the Act attempted to enrol and the existing socio-technical arrangements the Act aimed to change, generates three core contributions. We (1) characterise the performativity of policy instruments as a process of bricolage that incorporates the principled attitude of making do on both sides of the divide – those who design the policy and those who are charged to implement it; (2) identify the mechanisms through which the performativity of an envisioned model of marketization operates at multiple scales within a complex and highly distributed system of provision; and (3) document and explicate why specific performances result in misfires and unintended outcomes. Thus, we conceptualise policy performativity as a non-linear, dynamic process where theories and their effects are constantly being assessed and reconfigured.

If you believe in Santa, do not read this paper. Through an in-depth, qualitative, empirical study, we follow the Santa myth to a remote northern location in Lapland, Finland where, for one month a year, multiple actors come together to create a tourist market offering: the chance to visit Santa in his ‘magical world’. We explore how the myth is transformed into reality through performative, organisational speech acts, whereby felicitous conditions for the performance of visits to Santa are embedded in a complex socio-material network. We develop the performative turn (Gond et al., 2016) in organisational studies by introducing a new category of speech act, ‘translocution’, a compendium of imagining, discussing, proposing, negotiating and contracting that transforms the myth into a model of an imaginary-real world. Through translocutionary acts, actors calculate, organise the socio-material networks of the market, and manage the considerable uncertainty inherent in its operation. De...

This paper breaks new ground by revealing and conceptualizing the marketization of science as a process that transforms scientific discoveries and markets through a series of choreographed contestations: moments of valuation that occur when different social worlds collide. We follow a scientific discovery, from the moment it entered an incubator, to uncover how valuation practices and market devices enact and contest diverse social values (i.e., what is worth doing) to generate economic value (i.e., what is worth paying for) at the science-market-entrepreneurship nexus. In contrast with commercialization of science studies that focus on institutional arrangements, this study explicates the practices and devices used by multiple market actors to transform a scientific discovery into a marketable object. In so doing, we characterise choreographed contestations and the mechanisms through which they operate to explain how specific valuations are performed to work out innovative next steps that unfold the marketization of science.

Given a progressively more competitive global environment, it is increasingly being contended that the central factor in the success and survival of organizations is the effective management of buyer—supplier networks (Gummesson, 2002; Thorelli, 1986). We define a “buyer—supplier network” as a web of interdependent firms working together to supply services and products to one focal buyer (Moller et al., 2005; Moller and Torronen, 2003). One example of a buyer — supplier network is an outsourcing relationship in which the buyer is based in a developed market and the supplier is located in an emerging market. In this regard, such firms are increasingly less likely to behave in isolation when developing customer and competitor oriented strategies. In doing so, these firms are required to develop unique learning capabilities in order to improve their responsiveness to customers (Day, 2002; Schultze and Boland, 1997; Slater and Narver, 1995). Such issues have been explored within the marketing literature (Baker and Sinkula, 2002; Schultze and Boland, 1997; Slater and Narver, 1995), management learning literature (Loasby, 1999; Senge, 1990) and international business literature (Zander, 2003; Minbaeva et al., 2003). For example, Nobeoka et al. (2002) found that suppliers were able to lever their organizational learning through the development of strong interfirm relationships with multiple customers.

This paper explicates the enduring and permanent structures that empower market organisers to act as they shape the temporary markets of the Durga Puja festival in India. Market organisers invoke, create and assemble market devices that empower market actors to perform these temporary markets. Using a visual sociology methodology we show how organisers calculate and intervene to empower certain market actors - specifically, ‘those at the BoP’, as well as to disempower certain forms of action - the use of toxic substances in the production of the Durga icon. We show how sometimes market empowerment and disempowerment are sustained beyond the performance of the temporary market, transforming the community and environmental practices. In this way, the paper foregrounds the two-way relationship between broader social structures and the performance of temporary markets by showing how market practices sometimes spread out beyond the market and become part of the broader structures of everyday life.

Critical incidents, such as horizontal mergers and acquisitions (MA thus companies re-conceptualise or ‘reframe’ each relationship to create shared understandings of how the relationship might work in practice. Previous research has shown that the way actors frame problems affects the decisions they make. Similarly, the way firms conceptualise their business relationships, affects their decisions regarding the design of their business model. It can be argued that the way companies reframe business relationships is, primarily manifestation of new business models and this affects both the decisions and actions that companies take regarding their business relationships. The challenge faced by companies attempting the reframing of business relationships is vividly illustrated by the impact of horizontal MA first, that in order for companies to adapt and evolve business models, reframing at the ‘strategic’ or ‘proprietary’ level must filter through and drive reframing at the both the foundation level and the rules level of business model development. Second, the ability of firms to transfer or drive reframing at all levels of the business model is dependent on ‘events’ or ‘critical incidents’ such as M&As.

Companies face difficult decisions regarding their management of business relationships; how much resource should they commit, when and with whom? The decisions managers make about these issues provide a ‘frame’ for their business relationships and thus a structure for their surrounding business network. Research has shown that the way problems are framed, affects the decisions managers and executives make (Bazerman 1984; Fiss and Zajac 2006; Tversky and Kahneman 1981). Similarly, the way business relationships are framed affects both the decisions and actions that companies take. Companies usually frame their business relationships by developing business models. In this way they conceptualize their relationships with other firms and aim to achieve higher levels of performance in the market place. This article describes role of business models in framing business relationships. We consider a business model as a ‘frame’ that includes structural elements, such as the selection and integration of a) network influence b) transactional relationships and c) corporate ownership, as well as procedural elements of how to ‘focus on the market’ such as a) customers, b) competitors and c) how to achieve inter-functional coordination of activities. We argue that companies select and integrate various configurations of these inter-related, and often overlapping, elements in response to end customers’ constantly evolving demands. This study examines real-world episodes using a cross-sectional investigation of a matched pairs sample of twenty high performing and twenty low performing UK firms. The study draws conclusions on the importance of scrutinizing business performance and the consequential re-adjustment of business models.

Firms face the challenge of working with other firms in their business network so as to increase the value of products and services offered to end customers and consumers. This often requires managers to invest in developing strong and effective business-to-business relationships. This paper explores how a buyer and supplier draw on their own identities and the identities of each other in ways that enable them to develop a basis on which to conceptualise and operationalise a strategic sourcing relationship. We conducted an in-depth, longitudinal case study of a buyer-supplier relationship which involves a manufacturer buying and complex design services. The study suggests that the corporate identity of companies involved in a relationship has a prominent role in informing development of the relationship.