Jérôme Meric

More than three’s a crowd . . . in the best interest of companies!

Purpose – The purpose of this paper was to decipher the contradictions and the ambiguities of crowdfunding as a term and as a practice to reveal the deeper significance of its underlying Zeitgeist. Design/methodology/approach – Three steps were followed. In the first one, the authors underline the ambiguities of crowd as a concept in its traditional meaning as well as in the realities, it may depict when referring to connected people. Thereafter, the many practices of crowdfunding with the apparent univocity of this term were confronted. Findings – These analyses led the authors to consider crowdfunding as ideology: an incantatory use of crowd can conceal an effective profit-making process, as well as a new way to unblock a stalling social elevator. Originality/value – As per the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one to try to conceptualize the social roots of crowdfunding and to analyze its deeper significance, as complementary to an already developed “how-to-do-it” literature. It is worth confronting this piece of reflexivity with the emerging literature on the assessment of specific crowdfunding operations.

More than three’s a crowd... in the best interest of companies !: Crowdfunding as Zeitgeist or ideology ?

The purpose of this paper was to decipher the contradictions and the ambiguities of crowdfunding as a term and as a practice to reveal the deeper significance of its underlying Zeitgeist.Three steps were followed. In the first one, the authors underline the ambiguities of crowd as a concept in its traditional meaning as well as in the realities, it may depict when referring to connected people. Thereafter, the many practices of crowdfunding with the apparent univocity of this term were confronted. These analyses led the authors to consider crowdfunding as ideology: an incantatory use of crowd can conceal an effective profit-making process, as well as a new way to unblock a stalling social elevator. As per the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one to try to conceptualize the social roots of crowdfunding and to analyze its deeper significance, as complementary to an already developed “how-to-do-it�? literature. It is worth confronting this piece of reflexivity with the emerging literature on the assessment of specific crowdfunding operations.

Understanding expert practices in order to control expert activities: The case of trading

Experts are important actors of organizational control. Nevertheless, experience suggests that they must be controlled as well. This is particularly the case for traders in financial institutions. We first identify the limits of traditional control patterns when the managing the activities of experts is at stake. Hyperspecialization, which is the ability to act within different logics and multiple time horizons, suggests that multidimensional representations of these activities be adopted and made explicit, which has the potential to prevent such activities from turning problematic. By examining bank risks and conducting additional interviews with actors from bank trading services, we recommend that multiple components of complexity be preserved when dealing with expert-related operational risks, instead of reducing this complexity to a single concept. Such an approach implies to turn back expertise against itself.

Crowdfunding in Present Society: Deconstructing the Zeitgeist

Purpose The purpose of this chapter was to deconstruct the underlying contradictions of crowdfunding practices and to show how crowdfunding practitioners develop a schizophrenic use of these contradictions. Methodology/approach The main contradictions of crowdfunding practices are introduced with theoretical references. Then short cases are used to illustrate how crowdfunding practitioners try to cope with these contradictions. Findings The crowd addresses many contradictions, first because it is a syncretic concept, second because online crowds are still to be proven crowds. In any case, crowdfunding practitioners do their best to take the advantage of these contradictions, and run the risk of falling between two stools. Originality/value An attempt to provide an analysis of crowdfunding as a social, and not only economic, phenomenon, to suggest avenues for further critical research on crowdfunding.