Anything but Sony! Meshworking, identity multiplicity and the emergence of portable music players

Abstract

This article explores the temporal processes through which firm identity emerges over time, and how the becoming of a firm's identity orients actors towards specific strategic pathways. Drawing on a historical case study of Sony and its development of consumer music technologies from the Walkman to digital music players (mp3), we present an alternative, processual framing of network relations through the ever-extending tangle of the meshwork. By introducing a meshwork-lens to the question of identity in business networks we emphasise the importance of a dynamic and complex identity multiplicity in shaping the action not only of the firm itself, but also in giving rise to the conditions for others to thrive. In doing so, we advance a processual approach to business networks and address the relatively undertheorized understanding of the temporal dynamics of identity in the IMP literature.