Studying crowdfunding through extreme cases: Cursory reflections on the social value creation process of a potato salad project

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Crowdfunding is a fairly novel phenomenon, both in taxonomic as well as in technological terms. Whilst at first mainly used to finance projects in the arts and the broader field of the creative industries (Bradford, 2012), political campaigns (Belleflamme, Lambert, & Schwienbacher, 2010) as well as entrepreneurial start-ups and SMEs (de Buysere, Gajda, Kleverlaan, & Marom, 2012), crowdfunding has meanwhile increasingly been employed as a vehicle for financing social and sustainable ventures or projects (Lehner, 2013; Thorpe, 2012)—which forms the focal attention of this chapter.

In general, so-called social purpose crowdfunding forms an alternative means of financing the overall operation of social ventures, or isolated projects or programs (Lehner, 2013, 2014; Lehner & Nicholls, 2014; Lehner, Grabmann, & Ennsgraber, 2014). The main assumption is thereby that social purpose crowdfunding offers project initiators or Social Entrepreneurs a financial remedy under conditions of increasing restrictions on traditional means of funding (Meyskens & Bird, 2015). Simultaneously, social purpose crowdfunding offers attractive invest- ment opportunities to those investors who are more interested in promoting social value than in earning a profit (Meyskens & Bird, 2015).

The basic contention the present chapter makes is that despite the almost univocally accepted promise of crowdfunding as an innovative tool for social value creation, relatively little is know about how this emergent technology works, and what kind of contingent effects it produces. This chapter argues that substantially new insights about crowdfunding in general and its rela- tionship to social value creation more specifically can be derived from the investigation of queer cases—a particular type of extreme cases which do not simply deviate from but largely upset and potentially change the very essence of the phenomena under consideration. To attain this goal, we will follow a potato salad crowdfunding campaign, which started as a fairly modest initiative before turning into one of the most prominent crowdfunding projects in the US. The project in question, which was perceived by many as a blatant hoax, challenges the linear “cause and effect” model underlying many conceptualizations of crowdfunding. It also makes us aware that social value creation is not necessarily attributable to the ingenuity of the project initiator or located in the proclaimed goal of a campaign; instead, social value in the case of the analyzed project forms a contingent effect emerging from the specific relations between an initial idea, the distinct agency of the crowdfunding platform, and the backers’ staging of an event.

The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we offer an overview of crowdfunding research, with an emphasis on how the crowdfunding process is framed in normative terms. Second, we introduce the concept of queer cases and draw on speech act theory to develop a provisional framework to analyze the infelicitous usages of crowdfunding. Third, we empirically analyze a Kickstarter project by Zack Brown aimed at raising $10 to produce a potato salad. Fourth, Brown’s potato salad project is analyzed in terms of how it breaches existing conditions of felicity. Fifth, we reflect on a more general level on how attentiveness to ostensible misfires and abuses of crowdfunding through queer cases creates an opportunity to experiment with new perspectives on the subject matter. The chapter concludes by calling for prospective research on queer crowdfunding projects which uproots convictions about how and where social value is created.