Organizing the Sharing Economy Through Experiments: Framing and taming as onto-epistemological work

Abstract

Prior work on performativity has illustrated how theories intervene in economic organizing. We expand this body of research by studying how concepts, and particularly those that are loosely defined and/or not widely understood, provoke their own realities through experiments. We examine how different experimental set-ups allow these concepts to be seized by a multitude of actors all wishing to instantiate worlds in their own interests, and how they potentially open up multiple competing realities as a result. We follow the concept of Mobility-as-a-Service as it mobilizes various experiments across public and private realms in Stockholm and Dublin, and we analyse how specific types of experiments co-produce epistemic and ontological work. Our results illustrate how different experimental designs can be conducive in taming and/or framing ambiguous concepts through interconnected processes of such onto-epistemological work. This highlights the distributed and relational but also the ‘provocative’ facets of performing ambiguous concepts through experiments. We discuss the consequences of these insights for how we think about scaling from experiments to broader socio-economic realities.

Strategy Performation to Avoid Degeneration: How producer cooperatives can achieve social and economic goals

“…Our findings echo recent calls to avoid the conceptualisation of performative effects as a binary outcome and instead focus on understanding ‘the processes by which performative outcomes are generated, the diversity of the performative outcomes themselves, and how these outcomes oscillate over time’ (D’Adderio, Glaser, & Pollock, 2019, p. 678). Whereas earlier studies tend to portray translation as linear (Chimenti & Geiger, 2023, p. 394), our findings indicate it is iterative and collective (Cabantous & Gond, 2015; Marti & Gond, 2018). In the performative journey, each iteration alters both the strategy and the organisation, resonating with the view that strategic initiatives are experiments that generate overflows (Callon, 2010; Garud, Gehman, & Tharchen, 2018).…”

“…This process depends on enrolling heterogeneous actors into assemblages supporting a given strategy (Callon, 2007). Those actors who are ‘all wishing to instantiate worlds in their own interests’ (Chimenti & Geiger, 2023, p. 378) might support or resist the assumptions contained in the strategy as these assumptions can be misaligned with how they view the cooperative’s raison d’être (Jentoft & Davis, 1993) and their roles in it. This can result in different groups of actors performing different visions of the organisation, resulting in different, coexisting and sometimes contradictory performations of the strategy, leading to tensions and conflicts (or ‘performative struggles’ (Chimenti & Geiger, 2023; Gond et al, 2016).…”

“…Those actors who are ‘all wishing to instantiate worlds in their own interests’ (Chimenti & Geiger, 2023, p. 378) might support or resist the assumptions contained in the strategy as these assumptions can be misaligned with how they view the cooperative’s raison d’être (Jentoft & Davis, 1993) and their roles in it. This can result in different groups of actors performing different visions of the organisation, resulting in different, coexisting and sometimes contradictory performations of the strategy, leading to tensions and conflicts (or ‘performative struggles’ (Chimenti & Geiger, 2023; Gond et al, 2016). The performativity of strategy is therefore a non-linear process in which the outcome is shaped by how these differing views are organised in relation to each other – or, as Mol (2003) refers to it, ‘ordered’.…”

In the Name of Transparency: Organizing European pharmaceutical markets through struggles over transparency devices

“…In tackling market transparency ‘as a set of devices, not as a principle’ (Grossman et al, 2008, p. 117), we build on previous studies inspired by actor-network theory (ANT) that have envisioned market power as embedded in the socio-material arrangements that structure market exchanges (Callon, 2017; Geiger & Gross, 2018; Chimenti & Geiger, 2023). More specifically, we consider studies that have focused on the blurry boundaries between markets and policy in ‘concerned markets’, that is, markets that are seen as a way of dealing with public interest problems (Geiger, Harrison, Kjellberg, & Mallard, 2014).…”

Breaching, Bridging, and Bonding: Interweaving Pathways of Social‐Symbolic Work in a Flanked Healthcare Movement

“…And if both approaches serve different purposes towards a common goal, how can they fruitfully be combined? Answering these questions is particularly important when challengers tackle highly entrenched or dominant institutions and/or in situations where institutional change is of great societal relevance (Chimenti and Geiger, 2023;Claus and Tracey, 2020;Grodal and O'Mahony, 2017;Wijen and Ansari, 2007). On the one hand, change needs to be acceptable to institutional incumbents or it may be quashed, so too much disruption is likely counterproductive.…”