Product publics and the early moments of nascent markets

Thesis

Product markets have been found to be socially constructed as industry logics, product ontologies and organising visions. Information intermediaries play an important field-level role in determining the categories and ontologies of emerging products. Within shared cognitive structures, sellers and buyers come together in mutual understandings on how products are used, what features are important and what counts as value.

Although market information is often legitimated through objective scientific methodologies, it can also appear as uncertain knowledge, or rumour. Contrary to the often seen conception of rumour as crowd-like behavioural contagion, it is presented here as an informal message lacking a reliable sponsor that is developed in an uncertain situation, but still may be subject to critical reasoning.

This thesis investigates the ambiguity around the fuzzy front-end of product markets, as social media and blogs that trade in rumour and proposition before any official announcement by firms. Through a process of improvised news, these online collectivities, as product publics, deliberate and collectively generate expectations as meaning structures. By tracking discourse from tech blogs, I trace the emergence of meaning in the tablet device product ontology. This occurred well before product introductions by firms who eventually came to form the market.

Authors: Hannigan, T

• Publication date: 2012
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-prxxb9xnz
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: product ontologies; rumour; new product development; concept networks; sensemaking; nascent markets; network text analysis; computational linguistics; early moments; markets as fields
• Subjects: Business and Management; Science and technology (business & management); Internet research