How audience heterogeneity impacts the fate of organizations: the case of the beer boom and the development of the beer industry in Switzerland

This project aims at providing novel insights about how audience members heterogeneity influences the emergence and development of a novel market. In contemporary research in the field of organization theory, audience members -that is shareholders, consumers, or experts- are considered as relevant determinants of organizations’ well-being. The main argument pushed forward in this field of research is that audience members scrutinize organizations’ behavior and even punish it when organizations deviate from audiences’ expectations (Hannan, Pólos, and Carroll, 2007). Although contemporary research in the field has greatly advanced our understanding of organizational phenomena, it has largely considered audiences as uniform groups of people whose observations about organizations are homogeneous. Such an assumption on audience homogeneity can be problematic as the consequences for organizations may be more or less lenient depending on audiences characteristics. In addition, research on audience members has overly focused on organizational evaluation and firms’ consequences when not complying with audience expectations, however, in so doing, current research leaves rather unexplored the relationship between audience members and entrepreneurial actions.This project aims at fulfilling these gaps by exploring how differences across audience members in regards to individual and collective characteristics facilitate scenarios for entrepreneurship and determine the evolution of a novel industry over time. Two main objectives will help us to reach this shed light in this area. The first objective is to develop a better understanding of how audience differences drive the emergence of an industry. We are particularly interested in how audience heterogeneity in individual and collective dimensions influence entrepreneurial outcomes such as founding of organizations, types of organizations founded, new products as well as innovative business models. The second objective of this project is to shed light in the understanding of how differences in audiences influence dynamic aspects of an industry. In particular, we want to investigate how differences in audiences impact organizational change, organizational learning, and the closure of enterprises.We focus on the Swiss beer industry that has witnessed a tremendous amount of new entries and other entrepreneurial outcomes as well as remarkable dynamics, e.g. through the disbanding of brewers, over the last 10 years. From less than 100 breweries in 2000, the number of breweries has exponentially grown to over 1200 breweries in 2021 in Switzerland. Because of its exponential growth and the strong relationship between producers and audience members in the industry, the Swiss beer industry offers important opportunities to explore our research questions. We thus aim to shed light on how audience heterogeneity influences entrepreneurial decisions as well organizational consequences that determine the emergence and dynamics in the Swiss brewery market.To achieve these goals, this project will rely on qualitative and quantitative data sources. The qualitative stage will be useful for both sub-projects to have a clear understanding of the variations across audience members and the process of how the industry emerged and evolved in the last decade. In addition to this, quantitative methods of analyses will be used to understand the implications of such heterogeneity among audience members on the emergence and dynamics of the industry.Our project contributes to the fields of organizational theory, entrepreneurship, and organizational learning by providing novel insights of the role of audience members and their heterogeneity on the emergence of a novel industry and its dynamics. Our project will also be influential to the Swiss beer industry, as the industry grew very fast in a limited time and still lacks systematic learnings from the beer boom that took place.ynamik liefert. Unser Projekt wird auch für die Schweizer Bierindustrie von Bedeutung sein, da diese in kurzer Zeit sehr schnell gewachsen ist und noch immer keine systematischen Lehren aus dem Brauereiboom gezogen hat.