Disruptive technologies and institutional processes in the creative industries: evidence from the fields of trade book publishing, academic publishing and music

This thesis explores an important yet underexplored aspect of management
studies, which is field-level responses to the entrance of a disruptive technology
in an institutional field. Despite the relevance of digital technologies (such as
the 3D printer) that not only improve competitive advantage of organisations
but also alter consolidated settlements in the distribution, appropriation and use
of resources within a field (for example, user-generated objects), current studies
of institutional theory and technology have overlooked how actors respond to
technologies that could potentially weaken their positions. Instead, existing
studies have focused on how actors embed their interests in new technologies.
Using qualitative methods in three empirical standalone papers, this dissertation
explores three cases of how actors respond to the entrance of a disruptive
technology in an institutional field. In Paper 1, co-authored with my thesis
supervisors, we explore technology’s affordances as integral to threats of
disruption to institutional settlement in the light of the introduction of the
electronic book in the field of trade book publishing. In this case, we found that
incumbents used rules/affordances bundles to temper the disruptive potential of
the technology. In Paper 2, I explore the case of scholarly book publishing in
which the possibilities afforded by Internet technologies make research
available in Open Access, thus threatening to disrupt established institutional
settlements (commercial publishers’ business models that are in place). In this
case, the incumbents (the commercial publishers) address threats to undermine
their privileged positions and interests effectively when they are not in a
position to oppose a reconfiguration of current arrangements. In the third paper,
I explore the case of the introduction of digital technologies into the music
industry, in which unorganised and non-strategic actors - consumers - catalyse
institutional change that organised actors adopt later. The dissertation’s main
contribution is to the literature on institutional theory. The three empirical
papers generated insights into how, despite the arrival of technologies with
disruptive potential, changes driven by the search for a new settlement between
conflicting interests led the incumbents and organised actors to responses that
co-opted the disruptive potential of the technology, leading to alternative
explanations to straight processes of institutional change. Instead of explaining
straight processes of institutional change, I put forward the three following
accounts: the dialectal interaction between opposing frames as driven by the
dual forces of material interests and social positioning, the co-existence between
institutional change and stability, and the accommodation between opposing
interests.