Grégoire Croidieu

TMI Signaling Credible Claims in Crowdfunding Campaign Narratives

One of the enduring insights about early-stage creative efforts is that their prospects for success depend on their ability to overcome a variety of liabilities of newness. In our study, we address one aspect of such liabilities: the ability to communicate credible claims about the merits of an idea when raising the funds required for execution. The narratives employed during fundraising are both a vehicle for assembling details about nascent ideas and a structure for communicating them to a wider audience. With this communication, entrepreneurs signal information that potential backers use to evaluate the claims. We argue that using language to differentiate new creative projects from the status quo is beneficial because of signal clarity, but employing a language of accountability that discloses too much information (TMI) may actually backfire when raising funds in open settings. We test this argument by analyzing a sample of crowdfunding campaign texts and find evidence supportive of our predictions. These results advance the literature on entrepreneurial narratives and signaling, establish some baseline characteristics of donation- and reward-based crowdfunding sites, and reinvigorate the application of Stinchcombe’s arguments about the liabilities of newness within a contemporary context.One of the enduring insights about early-stage creative efforts is that their prospects for success depend on their ability to overcome a variety of liabilities of newness. In our study, we address one aspect of such liabilities: the ability to communicate credible claims about the merits of an idea when raising the funds required for execution. The narratives employed during fundraising are both a vehicle for assembling details about nascent ideas and a structure for communicating them to a wider audience. With this communication, entrepreneurs signal information that potential backers use to evaluate the claims. We argue that using language to differentiate new creative projects from the status quo is beneficial because of signal clarity, but employing a language of accountability that discloses too much information (TMI) may actually backfire when raising funds in open settings. We test this argument by analyzing a sample of crowdfunding campaign texts and find evidence supportive of our predictions. T...

Labor of Love: Amateurs and Lay-expertise Legitimation in the Early U.S. Radio Field

Many actors claim to be experts of specialized knowledge, but for this expertise to be perceived as legitimate, other actors in the field must recognize them as authorities. Using an automated topic-model analysis of historical texts associated with the U.S. amateur radio operator movement between 1899 and 1927, we propose a process model for lay-expertise legitimation as an alternative to professionalization. While the professionalization account depends on specialized work, credentialing, and restrictive jurisdictional control by powerful field actors, our model emphasizes four mechanisms leading to lay-expert recognition: building an advanced collective competence, operating in an unrestricted public space, providing transformational social contributions, and expanding an original collective role identity. Our analysis shows how field expertise can be achieved outside of professional spaces by non-professionalized actors who master activities as a labor of love. Our work also reveals that lay-expertise recognition depends on the interplay between collective identities and collective competence among non-professional actors, and it addresses the shifting power dynamics when professional and non-professional actors coexist and strive for expertise recognition.

Responding from that Vantage Point: Field Position and Discursive Strategies of Legitimation in the U.S. Wireless Telegraphy Field

Our study explores the discursive strategies of legitimation that organizations employ as they occupy different positions in an emergent institutional field. By examining both the frame-alignment strategies and the frame targets of two organizations in the U.S. wireless telegraphy field, we show how an organization’s position – and its positional changes over time – affects the discursive strategies it uses to promote or protect its goals in the face of pressure from other field actors. Our results indicate that three distinct field positions – peripheral, central, and niche – are associated with three different legitimation strategies – which we label “robust,” “co-optive,” and “focused” – around which the discursive strategies coalesced. Organizations at the periphery attempt to break in to a field by employing a diverse range of frame-alignment strategies targeted toward a variety of relevant field actors. Those in a central position target fewer actors, but pursue a similar variety of frame-alignment strategies. Those in a niche position use fewer alignment strategies and target a smaller number of field-level actors. Our study enriches the literature on discursive strategies of legitimation by focusing on the ways in which central and non-central actors employ them, and the ways in which these strategies evolve alongside the field itself. More broadly, our work contributes to our understanding of discursive skills required to confront complex institutional pressures. These efforts depend on the interactive nature of discursive strategies from the vantage point of different field positions.

Book Review: Varietals of Capitalism: A Political Economy of the Changing Wine Industry

Over the last 30 years, the most fascinating institutional change in the wine industry has been the legitimization of New-World ideas and practices. These new wines rose to challenge the Old World and displaced its hegemony, as wine consumption and production expanded globally. Often seen simply as good news for curious but cost-conscious wine-lovers, this in fact represents a profound change in the global political economy of wine, in which a standardized demand-oriented market logic, supposed to please a hypothetical ‘new consumer’, is uprooting the deeply entrenched appellation-based, supply-oriented terroir logic grounded in age-old traditions. This struggle between global varietal brands and place-based craft products has taken place in different communities across the globe. Xabier Itçaina, Antoine Roger and Andy Smith, of Sciences Po Bordeaux, study how EU officials forged and implemented a major reform of the wine-market in 2008 that institutionalized this new logic across Europe. Their book, Varietals of Capitalism, builds on five-years of fieldwork and on historical institutionalism to propose an account of this reform they name ‘structured contingency’. Their proposition emphasizes the political work by actors, who jockey for positions in multi-level and interconnected institutional orders. By ‘political work’, the authors mean that actors engage in field struggles and manoeuvre by problematizing, instrumentalizing and legitimizing ideas they wish to promote. Their central thesis is that these political efforts lead to institutional change if, accidentally and synchronously, the actors’ political work coincides and resonates with the dynamics occurring at other levels and in connected fields. The authors exploit the great variety of cases observed during fieldwork to stress and buttress the contingent role of inter-field accidental resonance in accounting for institutional change. What else do the authors bring to the table? Well, their book appeals to more than wine connoisseurs, covering the timely issues of how Europe is governed, how globalization affects European producers and consumers, and to what extent academic, economic and bureaucratic experts mobilize textbook neo-liberal rhetoric to translate impalpable and complex globalization forces into lasting and consequential legal reforms – a selection of topics that organization theorists will undoubtedly appreciate. The authors also gather a broad range of competing arguments from political science, sociology and economics to discuss their well-documented case, thus engaging readers in a stimulating intellectual debate. Last, their book sets a gargantuan challenge, in the historicaland comparative-institutional vein: to develop a parsimonious, consistent account of the variety of sources and consequences of a EU reform across levels, fields, regions and countries. Varietals of Capitalism does not simply harvest the low-hanging fruit. 664462OSS0010.1177/0170840616664462Organization StudiesBook Review research-article2016