The role of everyday actors in constituting organizing visions in the digital age

Purpose This study aims to advance organizing vision (OV) theory – a much-overlooked native IS theory – by extending it to the digital age. Specifically, despite the empowerment of everyday actors in the digital age, the theory offers limited insights into how everyday actors help shape community cognition around a technology (i.e. OV). We aim to address this critical lag in OV theory in the new era. Design/methodology/approach This study is an inductive, theory-building case study of the organizing vision for fitness trackers. We performed a constant comparison analysis between the data and our emergent understandings. Findings We discover that everyday actors broadly perform four OV-constituting acts. They include composing, amplifying, muffling and contextualizing. Each act is rooted in more concrete, discursive technology framings. Everyday actors' constituting acts also evolve over time, generating more nuanced OV trajectories than previously documented in the literature. Practical implications Everyday people are now central to shaping the meaning, legitimacy and adoption of digital technologies. Firms, marketers, policymakers and educators who ignore their discourse risk missing critical drivers of diffusion in the digital era. Originality/value Theorizing everyday actors is novel to OV theory. Specifically, our study challenges an assumption rooted in the 1990s information age, captures unique ways in which everyday actors discursively frame technology, and produces a concrete conceptual tool – a typology of OV-constituting acts – that is conducive to aptly theorizing OVs in the digital era. Our longitudinal findings also recast a widely held view that an OV evolves as an integrated whole in a unified manner.