Organizational Research and Audiences: How Customer Reviews Reflect and Shape Organizational Processes

Current state of literature. Current audience-based approaches to organizations in management research have demonstrated that audiences take an integral role in shaping various organizational outcomes such as evaluation, revenue, and survival. Most of this literature uses online ratings of organizations, such as restaurant reviews, to gauge audiences’ evaluations and reactions. Gap in literature, objective of the proposed project. Researchers acknowledge the possibility that online review data do not necessarily directly mirror audiences’ reactions, which makes reliance on online review data potentially problematic for organizational research. For example, reviewers may be self-selected to post reviews and may be influenced by peers or by previous ratings. Although these concerns are valid, the extant literature is mostly silent on these issues. The main research question of this proposal is to explore when and how reviewer behavior enables management scholars to understand organizational audiences, specifically, when studying theoretical questions such as the effect of generalism, status, organizational identity, innovation, organizational change and adaptation. The possible findings will be likely to also have implications for research on online reviewer behavior, cultural sociology, marketing, information systems research, and crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.Expertise of the applicant. The applicant has actively contributed to this research stream by recent publications demonstrating how category-spanning organizations are devalued by audiences, how a status shock affects audience evaluations, and how authenticity and identity influences restaurant ratings. This research has been published in leading management journals, such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and Management Science. Details on research proposal. The research project will address a set of relevant questions concerning organizations and reviewing behavior. Besides continuing to work on existing large-scale online review data sets (Yelp, Goodreads, Amazon, Tripadvisor), the applicant will extend his research into two other subprojects. The first subproject will contain small-scale off-line and on-line experiments to assess how certain mechanisms such as visibility, rewards, expectations, and social influence affect reviewers’ self-selection to reviewing and evaluation of organizations. The second subproject will analyze very detailed data on reviewer’s behavior on a major European consumer website which has recently been made available to the applicant through a research agreement with the organization managing the website. Also in this subproject, in cooperation with the organization, the applicant is planning to run large-scale field experiments building on the customer base of the more than 100,000 active users of the website. The two subprojects will run parallel and in dialogue with each other.