From invisible hand to visible hand: platform governance and institutional logic of independent Mac developers, 2001-2012

Amongst the research of institutional logics, field-level logics have continuously gained interest among scholars. A cultural emergence model of field-level logics was proposed in the latest development of the institutional logics perspective (Thornton et al. 2012). This study aims to validate a section of the model: the relationship between resource environment and emergence and evolution of field-level logics, and do so in the context of Apple’s independent Mac OS X developers – Mac indies. Through a qualitative interpretive study, and a combination of narrative and content analysis, we identify the resource environment of Mac indies: platform governance and developers’ own economy, and examine a critical platform governance change from Apple – its role shift from being primarily a technological platform to one that includes a market exchange, and show that a software ecosystem logic prevailed for Mac developers prior to the change, and a platform ecosystem logic emerged after that.