Algorithmic Imaginaries and Self-Worth Among Social Media Content Creators
(Job Market Paper)
This study investigates how social media content creators make meaning of the algorithms that mediate their success on platforms. Recent studies find that platform workers experience the algorithms as a constraint on their autonomy, a perspective driven particularly by the opaqueness of this black box technology. Using interviews, in-person observations, and online observations of their work, this study investigates how content creators on social media platforms, who consider their work as a form of self-expression, make meaning of the algorithms that govern their work and success. This study reveals that, for content creators, opacity not only constrains their work, but also enables flexibility in their meaning-making in ways that help with the preservation of their self-worth. My findings suggest that content creators experience the success of their work as unpredictable due to the opaque algorithms mediating it, which poses a threat to their self-worth. However, this same opacity also enables content creators to shield their self-worth by allowing them to make meaning of the algorithms in ways that discredit the technology such as by attributing bias and/or inconsistency to it. Systematic patterns underlying content creators’ meaning-making of algorithms emerge from this study. These findings contribute to our understanding of how platform workers experience algorithms that govern their work and success.
Building a Bridge to the Future: Prospective Legitimation in Nascent Markets.
(with Derek Harmon and Eunice Rhee) Strategic Management Journal. Published online.
How do new things in nascent markets become legitimate? Existing research points to a process where legitimacy is built by making associations with already legitimate ideas from other domains. In this study, however, we investigate the Internet boom of the 1990s, a nascent setting where something new—engagement metrics used to evaluate firms— gained legitimacy amongst investors, but not by being associated with already legitimate metrics. Using a question‐driven mixed‐methods approach, we reveal that these new metrics instead gained legitimacy through a novel process we term prospective legitimation, where a new basis of legitimacy was constructed by firms linking their otherwise unproven new metrics to future profitability. We discuss how these findings inform research on legitimacy, the development of nascent markets, and future‐oriented communications.