Shaping Markets through Actor Engagement: An Institutional Work Perspective

Bio

Professor Jodie Conduit is Head of the Marketing Discipline at the Business School at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her research interests lie in understanding how to engage consumers in interactions with organizations, and each other, that enable them to work together to achieve meaningful and relevant outcomes, particularly in contexts for social inclusion and environmental sustainability. This underpins her research agenda in the areas of customer engagement, value co-creation, and more broadly in service research. Her research has been widely published in leading journals including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Industrial Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Service Management among others. Jodie is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Service Theory and Practice and an editorial board member for AMS Review. She is also a Board Member for Green Industries SA.

Abstract

Markets are shaped by the purposeful actions of various actors in the market. While recent literature notes the need to mobilize actor engagement for market shaping, the underlying process remains nebulous. Drawing on both institutional work and actor engagement literature, this paper thus explicates a framework that conceptualizes how market shapers can drive market change by facilitating actor engagement. The conceptual development in this paper is supported by an illustrative case study of the Winding Tree, a decentralized travel marketplace using blockchain technology. The Winding Tree shapes a marketplace by disrupting existing, creating new, and stabilizing resource linkages through influencing actor engagement. It presents a novel framework explaining the way in which market shapers facilitate systemic engagement of actors in the market system. This paper advances our understanding of the process through which the institutional work of market shapers leads to new resource linkages and higher resource density in emergent market systems by means of actor engagement.