Corentin Curchod

Categorization and identification: The identity work of ‘business sellers’ on eBay

This article aims at gaining a better understanding of how, in a market environment, categorized actors construct their identity in relation to the category to which they are assigned. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted at eBay, we consider how the newly categorized ‘business sellers’ connected eBay’s framing of the category (categorical framing) to their subjective interpretations of it (categorical self). We find that business sellers perceived varying levels of discrepancy between categorical framing and categorical self, which led them to engage in processes of identification, identity work and disidentification. Based on our findings, we present a framework relating the level of perceived discrepancies to distinctive paths of identification and we draw implications for understanding the interaction of categorization and identification. The framework highlights how feelings of self-enhancement, injustice and alienation intervene in orienting individuals’ paths of identification.

Buyer Strategizing in Continuously Recreated Markets: Loyalty, Deviance and Defection

This article examines the daily strategizing of buyers, taking the dyad to be the elementary unit of analysis in market dynamics. The ideas are revisited that dyadic market relationships converge towards loyalty (Kirman and Vriend), and that markets tend towards social or institutional stabilization over time (Zuckerman). The phenomenon investigated is that although individuals strategize in each dyad in non-conformist ways, the stability of the market is nevertheless preserved. The empirical setting for these investigations was the Paris-Rungis market in France, one of the world’s largest wholesale markets for fresh products. Data collected through observations and interviews were coded, and a theoretical model was built on the analysis of these data. Among the main findings are that buyers’ recurrent deviance from dyadic rules maintains some level of instability, and that both sellers and market regulators exert opposing forces towards market restabilization through different modes of action.

Intermediation as a Strategic Concern: Three Issues of Interest

Intermediaries like merchants and brokers play a major role in the process of production and trade but are still relatively ignored as such by the strategic and managerial literature. This research note asserts that beyond the final output on market efficiency, already well studied by micro-economists, the dynamics of intermediation raises fundamental issues about the strategic motivations behind intermediation moves like disintermediation or the creation of new intermediaries, the capabilities that intermediaries must develop to be accepted in their chain of interrelations and their ability to change the global repartition of value at their own advantage. The research note develops these theoretical issues with the main objective to ask questions about the dynamics of intermediation and illustrates them with four cases of creation of new intermediaries during the Internet era.