Speaker: William G. Mitchell, U. of Toronto
Speaker: Violina Rindova, The U. of Texas at Austin
Speaker: Joseph Porac, New York U.
Speaker: Marvin B. Lieberman, U. of California, Los Angeles
Organizer: Jessica Burshell, U. of Toronto
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| Scholars of organizations, strategy and management have a longstanding interest in the ways that organizational actions and/or market structure relate to the performance of particular organizations or markets. However, much early empirical work struggled to clearly identify consistent results on causal links that explain the outcomes of interest. This is likely attributable – at least in part – to the fact that organizations and markets do not just exist. They are outcomes of processes that involve the actions and interactions of numerous actors: they are socially constructed. A variety of different perspectives have developed that contribute to our understanding of social construction processes. However, because these insights often focus on particular aspects of social construction (e.g., product innovation, consumer perceptions, alliance patterns of firms, etc.), we rarely come together as a community to assess the progress we are making – and remaining opportunities – for pursuing our shared, underlying interests. The goal of this PDW is thus to bring together scholars from a variety of perspectives related to strategy and organization theory to discuss our collective understanding of the way that markets emerge, function, change and dissolve as outcomes and structures in social construction processes that are fundamentally shaped by social and cognitive processes at individual, organizational, and other collective levels. |