Marcel Morisse

Almost an MNC: Bitcoin Entrepreneurs' Use of Collective Resources and Decoupling to Build Legitimacy

Studies of legitimacy have typically looked at the creation and maintenance of legitimacy by both established and new organisations. This paper looks at how a set of entrepreneurs use the legitimacy of one, Alternative, community as a scaffold to build legitimacy in a more Mainstream one, despite the fact that norms between the two were often contradictory. Studying Bitcoin entrepreneurs in Europe, we find that the distributed, digital community of Bitcoin operates as a kind of MNC: the larger decentralised (and Alternative) community acts as the headquarters, while the local entrepreneurs seeking Mainstream legitimacy behave like subsidiaries. This allow them to rely on the legitimacy of the community at large, while simultaneously distinguishing themselves from the broader Bitcoin community as they seek legitimacy.

A Mixed Blessing: Resilience in the Entrepreneurial Socio-Technical System of Bitcoin

Studies of resilience highlight the tension between actions that allow a firm – and a system – to be robust and those that allows it to be flexible. Studies suggest that an entrepreneurial firm will prioritize flexibility, given resource constraints. However, what occurs when a number of firms are embedded in a common socio-technical system and an extreme event affects them collectively? This paper tests whether existing theory about resilience predicts the responses of entrepreneurs in such a system, with reference to an extreme event in the Bitcoin socio-technical system: the much-publicized bankruptcy of Mt.Gox, a key player. It relies on in-depth interviews with 8 entrepreneurs in Europe, triangulated with other data. We find that robustness is the dominant strategy for those interviewed. This is partly because the firms rely on pooled resources supplied by the collective, and partly because robustness builds trust, giving the firms a competitive advantage.

Trust in Network Organizations -- A Literature Review on Emergent and Evolving Behavior in Network Organizations

This systematic literature review examines different forms of evolving and emergent behavior in network organizations (NO) with an emphasis on trust. Because of the difficulties and importance in researching emergent behavior in network organizations, this review summarizes the main aspects of 17 papers and tries to disclose open research points by combining the different perspectives of behavior and forms of NOs. Due to the complexity of those organizations, there are several “soft aspects” that affect the partnership implicitly. In particular, trust is intertwined with other facets (e.g. legal aspects). IT governance and IT systems can have an impact on trust and vice versa. Therefore, maintaining a trustworthy relationship in a network organization is undoubtedly an enormous challenge for all participants. At the end of this literature review, we discuss some open research gaps like the influence of different cultures in NOs or the visualization of emergent behavior.

How infrastructures anchor open entrepreneurship: The case of Bitcoin and stigma

This paper delves into the question: How does an entrepreneur commercialising an open source technology (an “open entrepreneur”) respond when an underlying infrastructure that is maintained by a distributed and heterogeneous community become stigmatised, particularly when the source of the stigma is unclear? Research has found that, when faced with stigma, the most effective and robust strategy for established nondigital firms is to try to and create a distance from it. Open entrepreneurs with different ideologies would likely benefit from similar actions; however, the interdependencies created when they rely upon a digital infrastructure may make this strategy impossible. Given the tensions between ideological heterogeneity and a shared infrastructure, how—and why—do open entrepreneurs respond to stigma? This paper extends existing literature on stigma by developing a model of ideologically mediated responses to stigma by open entrepreneurs through an inductive study based upon interviews, archival, and forum data. We further contribute to extant literature on open entrepreneurship by proposing a model of ideologically mediated responses to stigma, which is grounded in group identity theory. We also build on digital infrastructure literature by proposing the concept of digital infrastructure anchoring. Lastly, we show how ideological heterogeneity leads to business model heterogeneity among open entrepreneurs and discuss the practical implications of this research.