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The purpose of this chapter was to deconstruct the underlying contradictions of crowdfunding practices and to show how crowdfunding practitioners develop a schizophrenic use of these contradictions.

The main contradictions of crowdfunding practices are introduced with theoretical references. Then short cases are used to illustrate how crowdfunding practitioners try to cope with these contradictions.

The crowd addresses many contradictions, first because it is a syncretic concept, second because online crowds are still to be proven crowds. In any case, crowdfunding practitioners do their best to take the advantage of these contradictions, and run the risk of falling between two stools.

An attempt to provide an analysis of crowdfunding as a social, and not only economic, phenomenon, to suggest avenues for further critical research on crowdfunding.

Crowdsourcing – a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries – provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. Integrating work on organization theory and innovation, the authors first develop a framework that characterizes crowdsourcing into a main sequential process, through which organizations (1) define the task they wish to have completed; (2) broadcast to a pool of potential contributors; (3) attract a crowd of contributors; and (4) select among the inputs they receive. For each of these phases, the authors identify the key decisions organizations make, provide a basic explanation for each decision, discuss the trade-offs organizations face when choosing among decision alternatives, and explore how organizations may resolve these trade-offs. Using this decision-centric approach, the authors continue by showing that there are fundamental interdependencies in the process that makes the coordination of crowdsourcing challenging.

The ubiquity of digitally intermediated interactions is changing the ways in which social interaction creates the cognitive and institutional underpinnings of new markets. Logics that define markets used to be localized, but they now emerge from crowds that span – and persist – across time and space. This article builds a theory of how crowds emerge and evolve in a way that influences the emergence of shared logics and helps explain why some markets are viable while others are not. What is revealed is that a crowd has a hidden niche structure that determines the fate of a new market.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.

Since tourism is viewed as being a fast-growing industry, researchers are keen to investigate the negative impacts brought by an increasing number of visitors. As one of the derived social impacts, crowding has been proven to have a negative effect on tourists’ visiting experience. Thus, this study aims to understand tourists’ perception of crowding and its subsequent effect on their loyalty. A theme park in China called China Dinosaur Land, located in Jiangsu Province, is selected as the research site and 296 valid questionnaires are collected from the visitors. The results illustrate that psychological states, such as perceived crowding, emotional response, and coping behavior are much more complex than the study initially proposes; therefore, the hypotheses of the study are amended according to the research results.

An emerging management trend is to use the “wisdom of the crowd” to make decisions traditionally made by the top management alone. Research on this phenomenon has focused mainly on the capacity of crowds to generate ideas, but much less is known about a crowd’s capacity to select ideas. To study crowd-based idea selection in firms, this chapter develops a mathematical model of a crowd that makes decisions by majority voting. The model takes into account contingencies that are of particular importance to firms, namely: the size of the population from which the crowd is drawn, the distribution of accuracy among members of the population, and the firm’s ability to recruit the population’s most accurate individuals. The results show that: (1) under relatively common conditions, increasing the size of the crowd may actually reduce performance; (2) near-optimal performance can usually be achieved by a much smaller crowd than the one required to achieve optimal performance; (3) determining the best crowd size depends critically on the firm’s ability to recruit “accurate” individuals; and (4) good performance does not require large crowds unless all population members exhibit low levels of accuracy.

For at least three decades, inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) has attracted scholarly attention and many studies have unveiled its inner dynamics. More recently, new phenomena have appeared in the changing landscape of IOC, affecting the way in which organizations are open to interact with, and rely upon, other actors that may be standalone entities as well as representatives of other organizations. These actors operate “betwixt and between” the organizational core and its external environment(s), populating a liminal space located at the organization’s boundary in which activities take place according to non-proprietary and non-employment logics. The authors focus on the forms of collaboration, which blur the lines between organizations, calling into question the fundamental label of crowd-focused IOCs. The authors consider two forms: crowd-open and crowd-based organizations. The authors show the organizational design impact of openness spans from the mere scalability associated with organizational growth to the phenomena of reshaping formalization and standardization of roles and processes, and self-organizing over time.

Since waiting in a queue may induce both negative and positive effects on customers’ quality perceptions of which the queue is formed, an optimal queuing wait which is long enough but not too long to have positive effects on the pursued service is critical for successful queuing management. This study examined the existence of an optimal queuing wait at theme parks by merging the interpretative approach of institutional norms with the measuring application of the adapted Return Potential Model from crowding studies. Using quota and systematic sampling techniques, survey data were collected from 1,440 visitors to five leading theme parks in Taiwan. An optimal queuing wait represented by an institutional norm among visitors with moderate consensus for the longest acceptable waiting time (LAWT) was revealed in this study. As a critical reversal point of visitors’ quality perception, significant ascent of visitors’ crowding perception did occur when their actual waiting times exceeded their LAWT.

A firm's behavior is constrained by its access to resources owned or controlled by different constituencies in its environment. Mergers and acquisitions are one way to proactively manage these resource dependencies. Research on resource dependence reducing merger and acquisition patterns provides an important cornerstone of resource dependency theory and a basis of our present knowledge of the aggregate industry-level merger and acquisition patterns. However, due to the predominant focus on inter-industry merger and acquisition patterns in earlier research, much less is known as to whether the same logic could also be applied to explain intra-industry merger and acquisition patterns. In this chapter, we extend the resource dependence results to an intra-industry context. In particular, we show that mergers and acquisitions among pharmaceutical firms tend to take place among firms with technological and competitive interdependencies. To distinguish our finding from the competing resource scale and scope explanations, we show that the likelihood of a resource dependence reducing acquisition is moderated by the crowding of firms’ technological positions and prior alliance ties. Consistent with the resource dependence explanation, both weaken the effect of overlapping technological positions even though both alliance ties and crowding otherwise are positively related to merger and acquisition patterns in line with the social structural explanations.

Purpose – This chapter tests the effectiveness of different institutions to fundraise for environmental projects at tourism destinations.

Methodology – We conduct a series of experiments with tourists visiting the Island of Majorca, Spain, and test the fundraising capacity of a voluntary donation scheme, two tax levels, and a matching instrument. In the first treatment of our experiment, tourists have the opportunity to make a voluntary donation to a local environmental organization involved in environmental projects. In a high-tax and low-tax treatment, tourists are taxed some proportion of their initial endowment and then are allowed to make voluntary contributions from their remaining endowment. In a final treatment, the experimenters match, one-for-one, any voluntary donations.

Findings – We test the crowding-out hypothesis of taxes over voluntary environmental donations and find imperfect crowding-out (from 60% to 65% for different tax levels).We also explore potential crowding-in of matching instruments (widely used in nontourism settings for fundraising campaigns), but do not find any support for it.

Practical Implications – Our results support the conclusion that it would be reasonable to use voluntary donation programs and tourism taxes complementarily (instead of independently), to increase fundraising for environmental purposes at tourism destinations.