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This paper addresses social interatcion and the formation of value beliefs in markets. It empirically examines value construction by analyzing rebidding behavior in online auctions, wherein individuals reassess the maximum price they would pay for a given product. Statistical analyses of more than 10,000 auctions containing more than 55,000 individual bids on the auction website eBay suggest that rebidding is positively associated with a lack of auction-internal price information and bidder inexperience. Analyses also suggest that engaging in rebidding is positively associated with an individual winning an auction. This work, therefore, helps to provide a deeper understanding about valuation, price formation, and the organization of markets. This work contributes to domains of research related to the construction of value and the emergence, evaluation, and legitimization of new products, services, and ideas.

Purpose – Over the last 15 years, a growing literature on project-based organizing (PBO) has emerged, drawing on various theoretical streams based on distinctive and sometimes conflicting assumptions. Organization-centric approaches tend to highlight projects as portfolios that provide assets to meet strategic goals, but leave un-assessed the processes by which projects evolve, are chosen and governed. Field-centric studies of PBO tend to highlight how relations among and across actors (individuals or organizations) evolve over time, but also neglect how projects meet actors’ strategic needs. We introduce a “projects as events” perspective in an effort to integrate insights from these distinct conceptualizations.

Design/methods – We review previous studies on PBO and elaborate on the theorization of a “projects as events” perspective, suggesting various reasons why it might help advance research on PBO, for example, by allowing researchers to address how projects interact across multiple levels of analysis.

Findings – By drawing on examples from the creative industries, we illustrate various instances in which projects are events: sequences of activities that unfold gradually or suddenly, and trigger distinctive networks across multiple levels of analysis.

Originality/value – A projects as events perspective facilitates the use and the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, such as event sequencing with narrative analysis, or historical events with network analysis. By doing so, scholars may more easily cross levels of analysis by examining the various networks engaged in a project to unfold and provide a fuller understanding of PBO.

The concept of novelty is central to questions of creativity, innovation, and discovery. Despite the prominence in scientific inquiry and everyday discourse, there is a chronic ambiguity over its meaning and a surprising variety of empirical measures, which muddle the interpretation of prior findings and frustrate the consolidation of knowledge. To help dispel some of the unclarity, this paper presents a survey and synthesis of conceptualizations and operationalizations of novelty scattered across social, cognitive, and organizational studies. From this analysis, I advance the argument that novelty is generally regarded as a function of frequency or proximity, and in these two complementary perspectives, it is commonly bounded its empirical study and theoretical understanding. I further argue that contextual and temporal aspects are integral to the specification of novelty and primary contributors to its multifaceted nature.

Consecration is the process by which producers in creative fields become canonized as “greats.” However, is this the end of the story? Research on consecration focuses on the drivers of consecration but pays little attention to the post-consecration period. Furthermore, the research ignores the dynamics of consecration. To address these gaps, we examine the changing fortunes of a consecrated artist – the musician Phil Collins. We identify the ways in which three actors (fans, critics, and peers) assemble for consecration, disassemble for deconsecration, and reassemble for reconsecration. Examining the changing public image and commercial fortunes of Collins as a solo artist between 1980 and 2020, we identify an N-shaped process of rise-fall-rise that we call the Phil Collins Effect. This effect offers a new way of thinking about how cultural producers gain, lose and regain status in their fields.

Novel ideas emerge from conversational interaction dynamics in meetings that are organizational practices of interaction. Drawing from meeting science with a focus on multiparty talk in meetings as communicative events, we refer to interaction dynamics as sequences of verbal statements. We explore patterns of verbal statements in idea generation processes in an explorative, inductive field study of ministerial think tank meetings. These are recurring agile meetings with interactive, free-flowing communication. By utilizing the validated, fine-grained act4teams coding scheme, we differentiate between task-related, procedural, and socio-emotional statements made in these meetings. Our findings show that the interactions within agile meetings are characterized by intensified turn-taking, overlapping speech, and joint heightened involvement. By means of lag sequential analysis, we find that novel ideas emerge from interaction cycles of task and socio-emotional statements. Among the latter, active listening expressed by “mm” or “yeah” is of particular importance for triggering novel ideas. As such, we reveal the micro-level emergence of novel ideas in conversational interaction by highlighting the facilitative function of active listening.