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The purpose of this paper is to develop Delphi methodology toward a holistic method for forecasting market change. Delphi methodology experienced its culmination in marketing research during the 1970s–1980s, but still has much to offer to both marketing scholars and practitioners in contexts where future market changes are associated with ambiguity and uncertainty.

This study revives the Delphi methodology by exemplifying how a recently developed framework on market change can be combined with the Delphi technique for data collection to support forecasting activities and research. The authors demonstrate the benefits of the improved methodology in an empirical study on the impact of the fifth generation of wireless communications technologies (5G) on the Finnish media market.

The developed methodological approach aids marketing scholars in categorizing and analyzing the data collected for capturing market change; and better guiding experts/respondents to provide holistic projections of future market change. The authors show that using a predefined theoretical framework in combination with the Delphi method for data collection and analysis is beneficial for studying future market change.

This paper develops Delphi methodology and contributes with a novel methodological approach to assessing market change.

Examines critically traditional economic paradigms as well as those given by Hayek and Buchanan on markets with constitutional contracts in order to contrast them with yet another view of market ‐ that endogeneity of various political and economic processes creates a global system of interlinkages among and between policy variables and socio‐economic variables. By invoking the methodology and epistemology of such a system develops a theory of globally interactive market processes. In such a globally interactive system, markets are seen to be induced by and to regenerate circularly endogenous preferences. Knowledge induction becomes epistemologically critical in such an evolutionary and interactive order. Hence, these globally knowledge‐induced interlinkages generated by policy‐market interactions are made to establish and explain what is termed here as a system of social contracts.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework based on the identification and examination of the mechanisms (termed “viability mechanisms”) under which market-shaping activities yield the emergence of a viable market: one able to adapt to the changing environment over time while remaining stable enough for actors to benefit from it.

This paper uses extant literature to build a conceptual framework identifying viability mechanisms for market shaping and a case illustration examining how a viable market for Finnish timber high-rise buildings was created. The case exemplifies how the identified viability mechanisms are practically manifested through proactive market shaping.

The proposed conceptual framework incorporates four viability mechanisms identified in the extant literature: presence of dissipative structures, consonance among system elements, resonance among system elements and reinforcing and balancing feedback loops. It illustrates how these mechanisms are manifested in a contemporary case setting resulting in a viable market.

First, firms and other market-shaping organizations should look for, or themselves foster, viability mechanisms within their market-shaping strategies. Second, as failure rates in innovation are extremely high, managers should seek to identify or influence viability mechanisms to avoid premature commercialization of innovations.

This study identifies how these viability mechanisms permit markets to emerge and survive over time. Further, it illuminates the workings of the non-linear relationship between actor-level market-shaping actions and system-level market changes. As such, it provides a “missing link” to the scholarly and managerial discourse on market-shaping strategies. Unlike much extant market-shaping literature, this study draws substantively on the systems literature.

Combining institutional work and actor engagement (AE) literature, this paper aims to elucidate how the collective action of market shaping occurs through the interplay between market shapers’ institutional work and engagement of other market actors. While markets are shaped by actors’ purposive actions and recent literature notes the need to also mobilize AE, the underlying process remains nebulous.

This paper is conceptual but supported by an illustrative case study: the Winding Tree. This blockchain-based, decentralized travel marketplace shapes a market by decoupling existing resource linkages, creating new ones and stabilizing others through a dynamic, iterative process between the market shaper’s institutional work and others’ AE.

The paper develops a dynamic, iterative framework of market shaping through increased resource density, revealing the interplay between seven types of market shapers’ institutional work distilled from the literature and changes in other market actors’ engagement dispositions, behaviors and the diffusion of AE through the market.

This research contributes to the emergent market shaping and market innovation literature by illustrating how the engagement of market actors is a fundamental means of market shaping. Specifically, it advances understanding of how market shapers’ institutional work leads to new resource linkages and higher resource density in emergent market systems through AE. The resultant framework offers an original, critical foundation for future market shaping research.

The study of resource allocation in market venues is taken up in a comparative framework of neoclassical and various social contractarian theories. It is shown that economic theory does not have an explanation of substantive interactions among agents and variables as it does among society, economy and institutions, all of which social contractarian theory necessitates. Thus Rawls’s and Gauthier’s social contractarian theories are examined against neoclassicism and the classical theory of markets and resource allocation. Shortcomings with these theories are pointed out and a purely interactive theory of social contractarianism is propounded. Markets and resource allocation are once again studied in this framework.

The paper aims to explore how small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the health-care sector overcome the liability of being an outsider, instead of gaining a position as an insider in new networks in markets abroad and subsequently internationalizing. The following research questions are posed: How do firms in complex health-care markets build network relationships? How is business market knowledge developed and legitimacy acquired to overcome the liability of outsidership?

The paper uses a multiple-case methodology in a nested case study of health-care SMEs, which allows for in-depth study of the importance of network relationships, business market knowledge development and legitimacy building to enter a target market; the study maps the activities and different actor roles as the entry process unfolds. The study draws on empirical evidence from 13 companies as well as industry and interest organizations.

The results provide support for process-based explanations of how, but also of why the internationalization of health-care SMEs takes place in distinctive sequential phases, where it is necessary to complete one phase before it is possible to embark on the next. The study answers the calls for more empirical studies capturing how firms actively enter networks to overcome the liability of outsidership, become insiders and subsequently internationalize.

The principal contribution of the authors’ study is to add to the body of research on internationalization and advance the understanding of how to build an insidership position in relevant networks by overcoming the liability of outsidership. By choosing to study firms in the health-care sector, the authors also contribute to the limited research on firms entering markets characterized by a high level of complexity.

The much debated topic of economic regulation and deregulation in the perspectives of market transformation that is now gripping the global politico‐economic climate, is studied with the Islamic focus in it. In the attempt, comparative ideas in this area are taken up, particularly those propounded by Baumol with regards to regulation of firms to generate a semblance of competitive pricing. The Islamic firm is studied in reference to a knowledge‐based model of unification as complementarity among possibilities. Such a model is shown to be the crux of Shari'ah in the Islamic political economy as in the broadest sense of the socio‐scientific order, where process‐oriented as opposed to optimal models of equilibrium, apply. In reference to such a knowledge‐centered epistemological model of Divine Unity (Tawhid), it is argued that all kinds of regulation become redundant in the case of the Islamic firm. Such is a firm that complies with Shari'ah rules in the Islamic political economy. Here the socio‐economic transformation is guided towards realizing ethicized markets. The short‐run and long‐run cases are studied with regards to the problem of regulation. What is the nature of regulation for a modern Islamic firm in the face of a global market transformation process that is on? The answer to this question is to be sought first from the viewpoint of Islamic Law (Shari'ah) concerning economic regulation and the nature of goods, transactions, instruments and exchange in the market process. Secondly, the question of validity of some of the present days regulatory practices must be investigated. In this paper the above two points will be the focus of study.

This study aims at examining the current global financial crisis, by emphasizing its main causes and perspectives to define the way they can be avoided in the future. The paper argues that there is a need for a new International Financial System with the function of coordinating and guiding the different national and supranational institutions.

This article used complexity theory and viable system approach.

The findings suggest they are implicit features of these kinds of markets, due to their high uncertainty and hyper‐competitiveness, rather than temporary deviation from normal equilibrium. In this way, financial markets can be thought as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), which may precipitate in disorder and chaos because of a seemingly mild event, which activates latent forces and leads to emerging and unpredictable consequences. The orientation of international partners is to move towards a new international financial system, where the stabilization of financial system does not pass only through the bodies created in Bretton Woods, but through the endowment of new rules and new structures.

The research faces with evolutionary issues and it is impossible to know the total value of toxic derivatives still circulating in the world. Furthermore, the banks are still using the innovative finance to generate short‐term profits and shareholders' value.

The findings suggest some measures to limit future instability and crises, and to reduce their negative consequences.

The paper provides a new methodology to examine the financial crises and the way to limit them.