A sense-based perspective on market shaping: Theorizing strategies for the origination and propagation of new resource linkages

Abstract

“Market shaping”—the deliberate origination and propagation of valuable new resource linkages—describes how actors seek to steer markets into desirable directions. Yet, the exact nature of new resource linkages and how these emerge and disseminate remains unclear in extant literature. Addressing this gap, this research builds on the understanding that the meaning which market actors ascribe to resources defines their value as well as the potential for and the value of new resource linkages. From this lens, without a shaping of meaning, there is no shaping of markets. To advance market shaping research along these lines, we develop a novel sense-based perspective of sensemaking, sensegiving, and sensebreaking activities in the market shaping process that emphasizes embodiment, continuity, and temporal indivisibility and thus enhances the clarity and depth of market-shaping theory's central concepts. Moreover, drawing on recent organization theory literature, we delineate four generic sensegiving/sensebreaking strategies that market shapers may enact to originate and propagate new resource linkages: inspirational, expansive, authoritative and suppressive sensegiving/sensebreaking. By illuminating the four strategies' roles in this sense-based market shaping process, we provide new insights into how market shaping capabilities may become expressed in practice. We conclude by discussing managerial implications, limitations and future research.