PhD Thesis Defense Presentation: Jack Sadek
Jack Sadek, a doctoral student at 涩里番 in the Strategy & Organization area will be presenting his thesis defense entitled:
OUT OF THE SHADOWS:聽CRYPTOCURRENCY AND CATEGORY EMERGENCE聽 IN THE INFORMAL ECONOMY
Wednesday, August 6, 2025, at 1:00 p.m.
(The defense will be conducted in hybrid mode)
Student Committee Co-chairs: Professor Robert Nason
Please note that the Defence will be conducted in hybrid mode. If you wish to participate, please contact the PhD office and we will provide you with the defence details.
Abstract
A growing body of literature examining how new market categories emerge has focused primarily on the formal economy, where legality and legitimacy tend to align. In this dissertation, I examine category emergence from the informal economy, where economic activity is illegal under formal rules but considered legitimate by informal institutions. Much new market activity originates outside of formal rules, and the informal economy provides a generative context to challenge latent assumptions in the literature and build new theory on category emergence. I seek to do so through two in-depth empirical studies on the cryptocurrency market category.
Cryptocurrency, a new form of digital money, originated from the cypherpunk movement, with an original use case tied to drug trade and money laundering. Despite stigmatization and origins in the informal economy, cryptocurrency has grown into a market of over $2 trillion with widespread adoption by financial institutions and governments. My empirical analysis traces and deconstructs this unique category development trajectory, using it to extend the phenomenological scope of category emergence research, scrutinize underlying assumptions in the literature, and build theory. Practically, the dissertation is structured into three main chapters 鈥� one conceptual chapter and two distinct in-depth empirical investigations.
The first chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical setting of my dissertation. I expand on what we know regarding category formation, and I propose that examining categories in the context of the informal economy can be a fruitful avenue to expand theory. Combining literature on stigma and the informal economy, I seek to provide a more nuanced distinction between the formal and informal economy. This approach motivates generative avenues for exploring category formation in the context of the informal economy, some of which I pursue in the second and third chapters.
In Chapter 2, I focus on internal dynamics and challenge a dominant assumption in the literature category that early entrants cooperate to form a collective identity. In contrast, cryptocurrencies have been characterized by intense infighting from their inception. Therefore, my research asks: How do members of an antagonistic emergent category use discourse to shape the category鈥檚 identity? To examine this, I use discourse analysis to analyze over one million Tweets from three of the most notable category members: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. I find that while the category beacon, Bitcoin, uses a Discourse of Protection to fashion a prototypical category identity, challengers from the Ethereum and XRP communities use a Discourse of Inclusion that seeks to shape a goal-directed category identity.
In Chapter 3, I focus on external dynamics, examining the role of regulators who have been largely taken-for-granted actors in the process of category emergence. In the cryptocurrency category, not only are the rules unclear, but it鈥檚 also uncertain who has the authority to enforce them. Therefore, my research asks: How do regulators claim jurisdictional authority over an ambiguous category? To answer this, I examine the discursive strategies used by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to gain regulatory authority. Using topic modeling and discourse analysis, I analyzed 1084 documents collected from each agency's websites. I find that the SEC acts as an expansionary regulator, using a Discourse of Jurisdictional Spanning to extend its authority to the nascent category. In contrast, the CFTC represents an umbrella regulator, using a Discourse of Jurisdictional Lobbying, defining the category as part of its jurisdiction but hesitant to claim overall authority. As a whole, my dissertation seeks to extend the literature on category emergence by using its evolution from the informal economy as an insightful novel context.
