Drawing on interviews with 77 high-performing eBay business sellers in France and Belgium, this article investigates the power asymmetries generated by customers’ evaluations in online work settings. Sellers revealed a high degree of sensitivity to negative reviews, which, while infrequent, triggered feelings of anxiety and vulnerability. Their accounts exposed power asymmetries at two levels: the transactional level between sellers and customers and the governance level between sellers and eBay. Our findings highlight three main mechanisms underlying power asymmetries in this context. First, online customer evaluations have created a new form of employee monitoring in which power is exercised through the construction of visibility gaps between buyers and sellers and through an implicit coalition between buyers and the platform owner, who join together in the evaluation procedures. Second, by mediating and objectifying relations, algorithms reproduce power asymmetries among the different categories of actors, thereby constraining human agency. Third, online customer evaluations prompt sellers to exploit their practical knowledge of the algorithm to increase their agency. Through the lived experience of working for an algorithm, our findings contribute new understandings of power and agency in online work settings.

This article aims at gaining a better understanding of how, in a market environment, categorized actors construct their identity in relation to the category to which they are assigned. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted at eBay, we consider how the newly categorized 'business sellers' connected eBay's framing of the category (categorical framing) to their subjective interpretations of it (categorical self). We find that business sellers perceived varying levels of discrepancy between categorical framing and categorical self, which led them to engage in processes of identification, identity work and disidentification. Based on our findings, we present a framework relating the level of perceived discrepancies to distinctive paths of identification and we draw implications for understanding the interaction of categorization and identification. The framework highlights how feelings of self-enhancement, injustice and alienation intervene in orienting individuals' paths of identification.

This article examines how MNE subsidiaries develop nonmarket strategies to create a fit between a global market strategy and a local nonmarket framework. Derived from an analysis of archives and interviews on eBay's expansion into France, our findings suggest that MNE subsidiaries engage in defensive and proactive self-categorization to create their nonmarket strategic fit. Specifically, through the purposeful use of labels, rhetoric and narratives, self-categorization enables subsidiaries to strategically position themselves vis-à-vis both regulators and local incumbents, thereby exercising agency to influence the nonmarket environment in their preferred direction. The findings contribute to the institution-based view of international strategy by shedding new light on the interaction between MNE subsidiaries and local institutional authorities in a context of international expansion. Furthermore, we theorize how subsidiaries use self-categorization to transfer global organizational practices to the host country.

This article examines the daily strategizing of buyers, taking the dyad to be the elementary unit of analysis in market dynamics. The ideas are revisited that dyadic market relationships converge towards loyalty (Kirman and Vriend), and that markets tend towards social or institutional stabilization over time (Zuckerman). The phenomenon investigated is that although individuals strategize in each dyad in non-conformist ways, the stability of the market is nevertheless preserved. The empirical setting for these investigations was the Paris-Rungis market in France, one of the world’s largest wholesale markets for fresh products. Data collected through observations and interviews were coded, and a theoretical model was built on the analysis of these data. Among the main findings are that buyers’ recurrent deviance from dyadic rules maintains some level of instability, and that both sellers and market regulators exert opposing forces towards market restabilization through different modes of action.

Dire que la gestion est avant tout affaire de réactions à différentes formes de pression n'est pas chose nouvelle. Un des schémas les plus enseignés du management stratégique n'est-il pas celui des cinq forces (Porter 1980), qui pose le postulat que toute entreprise est soumise à la pression de son environnement et que son principal objectif consiste à contrer ces forces qui affectent sa profitabilité ? Depuis ces dernières années, le terme de « pression » traduit une perception partagée par une large diversité d'acteurs du monde économique, de l'employé ouvrier au directeur général, du fonctionnaire dans le secteur public à l'indépendant gérant seul son activité. Elle traduit également une réalité analysée par les journalistes économiques, les chercheurs universitaires, les consultants et les analystes financiers. Chacun parle de pression fiscale, de pression concurrentielle, de pression financière, de pression sur les marges, sur les ventes, sur le niveau de profit, de pression environnementale, de pression de l'évaluation permanente, de pression des chiffres, de pression des marchés, des consommateurs ou tout simplement des « groupes de pression ».