Market-shaping: navigating multiple theoretical perspectives

There is an increasing managerial and scholarly interest in the agential efforts of firms, consumers, public actors, and various collectives to influence market formation and transformation. Determining the essence of market-shaping requires an understanding of who is engaged in the shaping, what is being shaped, and how the shaping efforts are performed. To support making more informed choices about which theories to use when examining this phenomenon, we provide an overview of seven theoretical perspectives, illuminating their conceptual underpinnings and relative strengths. Building on this, we discuss how these perspectives can be used to examine market-shaping, highlighting its typical variations. The paper concludes by a call for greater explicitness, compatibility and parsimony when choosing theoretical perspectives for market-shaping research, and by identifying avenues for further research.