MARKUS GIESLER Associate Professor of Marketing Area Coordinator, Marketing
My Schulich Fellowship has been instrumental in supporting a series of in-depth empirical studies − all currently under review at the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research – investigating the role of affective regulation in the legitimation of platform markets. By facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent parties, platform markets like Uber, Airbnb, or Task Rabbit invariably shift risks from institutions to individual consumers. As such, they also foster new “feelings of uncertainty, discomfort, or anxiety” among consumers. Uber, for example, has sparked widespread cultural and consumer anxieties and national news media coverage related to ride safety, privacy, discrimination, and surge pricing. To address these issues, my co-authors, Ela Veresiu at Schulich and Ashlee Humphreys at Northwestern, and I theorize platform legitimation as an affective process. In this framing, a platform is regarded legitimate to the degree to which consumers can be
MARY WALLER Professor of Organization Studies Director, Schulich Centre for Teaching Excellence
My program of research concerns team dynamics in critical situations. Over the past two decades, my previous studies of aviation flight crews, nuclear power plant crews, seaport crisis teams, mine rescue teams, and other types of teams have consistently suggested that such well-trained, well-prepared teams show little variation in performance during the portions of critical situations that are very complex but well-understood or expected; however, team performance can differ greatly during situations that are unexpected, ambiguous, or non-routine. In order to better understand why this difference occurs, during my research fellowship year I concentrated intently on understanding more about emergent states in teams. Emergent states are phenomena in teams that arise after team members interact for a certain period of time − states such as trust, affect, shared cognition, or routines − that can greatly influence team outcomes. On the surface, a collection of teams may seem to be very similar; they may have the same number of members, and may have successfully completed the same amount of team training. During routine situations, the emergent states of these teams may remain dormant or not play a significant role in team performance. However, during critical situations that are unexpected, non-routine, and thus extremely stressful, emergent states such as trust or emotion may be catalyzed and play important roles in team functioning.
acculturated into a structure of empathy. We introduce the process of consumer empathization, which theoretically parallels Carolyn Pedwell’s sociological investigation of empathy, and examine the ways it helps to manage risk in legitimation. We define consumer empathization as a fourfold process of affective legitimation (apathization, verification, prototyping, and contracting) through which a network of empathetic relationships between producers and consumers is established and a consumer risk is contained. This theoretical formulation, which is based on an in-depth ethnographic analysis of Uber’s ride-hailing platform, (1) calls attention to the strategic role of emotions in platform legitimation; (2) offers insights into how companies can more effectively manage platform-based consumer risks; and (3) provides managers with conceptual instruments for sustaining a strong and enduring platform business over time.
In order to explore these ideas, along with my co-authors Gerardo Okhuysen (University of California, Irvine) and Marzieh Saghafian (Schulich School of Business), I reviewed existing work on emergence from the complex systems literature. Based on our review of this classic literature that spans many decades, we created a framework for examining emergence in teams. We then collected over 1,000 research articles in the group and team dynamics literature and carefully examined them for evidence concerning emergent states. Our work suggests that although research on team dynamics has addressed the influence of emergent states, it has done so in a mostly incomplete, static, linear, and piecemeal fashion that has not added significantly to our understanding of the differences among teams facing dynamic situations. We are delighted that our paper, “Conceptualizing Emergent States: A Strategy to Advance the Study of Group Dynamics,” is forthcoming in Academy of Management Annals, currently the highest-ranking management journal. In our article, we suggest several ways in which researchers can leverage nonlinear techniques and other methodologies to better detect and track the trajectories of emergent states, and build more complete understanding regarding how emergent states influence team outcomes in dynamic, critical situations. ◆
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