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This paper studies the interactive valuation discourses of an online user community (transfermarkt.de) that seeks to determine market values for soccer players. Despite their seemingly casual nature, these values have featured in newspapers, transfer negotiations, academic research, and capital market communication – and have thus become reified.

The paper employs netnographic research methodology to collect and thematically analyze a wide range of user entries on the platform. These entries are studied using theoretical insights from the sociology of quantification and valuation.

The analysis reveals how values are constructed in constant interaction between value-proposing users and value-justifying “experts.” This dynamic form of relational valuation positions players relative to one another as well as to actual transactions on the transfer market. In the absence of authoritative guidelines, it is this possibility and affordance for interaction that enacts a coherent valuation regime. The paper further reveals the platform's response to a disruptive event, which risked bringing the user-expert dynamics to a halt, requiring intervention from the platform to repair its valuation frame.

The paper responds to increased scholarly interests in the valuation of professional athletes. It contributes to the extant literature on valuation, first, by analyzing the dynamic valuation work that feeds into the social construction of values and, second, by studying platform participation and user interaction in a socially engineered online space.

This paper aims to examine how multinational corporations respond to environmental turbulence by adopting a flexible supply chain (SC).

This study adopts a case study in the medical industry to identify effective strategic approaches by taking advantage of new business opportunities and navigating complex business partnerships. This study focuses on medical diagnostic equipment, including computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and X-ray, that involves the suppliers, channel partners and medical users.

(1) The market turbulence brought the SC leaders to adopt multiple partnership approaches, i.e. funnel-based and area-based partnerships. (2) Adopting a funnel-based partnership allows the SC to seize new market opportunities. Still, it brought a risk element of SC failure from the flawed selection process and professional misconduct. (3) SC leaders adopted flexible partnerships to help address the risk of professional misconduct and select partners for long-term collaboration.

This paper contributes to emergent literature on social exchange theory by exposing the global SC when the SC leaders set up agility approaches. This paper also extends the discussion on the industrial marketing and purchasing theory, which seeks to promote an active buyer–seller relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a more detailed understanding of how embedding in different social networks relates to different types of action that individuals choose in the context of organizational closures, downsizing or relocations. To develop such insights, this paper focuses on three particular types of social networks, namely, intra-organizational; external professional and local community networks. These three types of networks have been frequently related to different types of action in the context of closures and relocations.

This is a conceptual paper. The authors develop the argument by integrating relevant recent literature on the salience related to embedding in different types of social networks, with a particular focus on responses to organizational closure or relocation.

The authors argue that at times of industrial decline and closure: embeddedness in intra-organizational networks can favor collective direct action; embeddedness in professional networks is likely to favor individual direct action and embeddedness in community networks can lead to individual indirect action. The authors then add nuance to the argument by considering a range of complicating factors that can constrain or enable the course (s) of action favored by particular combinations of network influences.

On a theoretical level, this paper adds to understandings of the role of network embeddedness in influencing individual and collective responses to such disruptive events; and direct or indirect forms of response. On a practical level, the authors contribute to understandings about how the employment landscape may evolve in regions affected by organizational demise, and how policymakers may study with or through network influences to develop more responsible downsizing approaches.