"From Invisible Hand to Visible Hand: Platform Governance and Institutional Logics of Independent Mac Application Developers, 2001-2012"

Abstract

Within the field of study in institutional logics, the identification of field-level logics has gained considerable interest among management scholars. A cultural emergence model of field-level logics was proposed in the latest development of the institutional logics perspective (Thornton et al. 2012). This study aims to validate a section of the model: the relationship between the resource environment and emergence / evolution of field-level logics, and do so in the context of Apple’s independent Mac OS X software developers, commonly referred to as Mac indies. Through a qualitative interpretive study, and a combination of narrative and content analysis, we first identify the critical components of the resource environment for Mac indies - platform governance and developers’ own economy. Subsequently, we examine how a critical platform governance change, the introduction of the Mac App Store, causes changes in the field-level logics observed within the Mac indie field. Specifically, as Apple shifts its role from being primarily a technology platform provider to a market maker (through the App Store), we show how the prevailing software ecosystem logic, prior to the App Store, changes to a platform ecosystem logic. We conclude by discussing the implications of the emergence of a new field-level logic in the field of consumer software.