On the socio-technical embeddedness of “Weibo florists”
Résumé
In late 2011, a Shanghai-based flower amateur, offering luxury bespoke bouquets, sparked an entrepreneurial wave of florists on the Chinese microblogging website Weibo. Some business experts have attributed her success to Weibo marketing and storytelling, establishing her as a landmark for e-commerce start-ups. However, from the perspective of the sociology of entrepreneurship, articulating the actor-network theory and the economics of convention, we find that these marketing strategies have been effective because Weibo florists were embedded in the online floral field, where the online marketing discipline based on the business practice of remote flower delivery set the rules of the game. Faced with exponential competition at the time, online florists focused on efficient economies of scale, at the expense of personal interaction with clients. On the other hand, they tended to simplify the prototyping of bouquets to reduce the uncertainty of their quality during floral delivery, while standardizing the production of local florists with whom they collaborated. The marketing discipline and these management conventions have then unexpectedly provided the institutional resources for the entrepreneuriat of Weibo florists.
Fichier principal
CY XIE_On the socio-technical embeddedness of “Weibo florists”.pdf (321.12 Ko)
Télécharger le fichier
Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
---|