Performing Possibilities: How the Addressable Market Method Enables and Endangers Coordination in the Technology Investment Field

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 3: Economic and Organizational Sociology

Abstract

How do economic actors coordinate collective investment when the calculative foundations of capitalism appear to fail? Emerging technology markets present this paradox acutely: firms without revenues, profits, or tangible assets routinely command billion-dollar valuations, yet traditional accounting metrics offer little guidance. This paper theorizes the resulting disjuncture as a threefold institutional crisis — epistemic, logical, and legitimacy — and asks how field coordination persists despite it.
The paper examines the Addressable Market Method (AMM), a calculative technique organizing imagined profit potential into a three-tiered hierarchy of Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Available Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). Drawing on an abductive analysis of over 9,000 quarterly earnings call transcripts from 500 U.S.-listed technology firms (2006–2024), supplemented by IPO prospectuses, analyst reports, and interviews, the study traces how AMM is enacted, contested, and institutionalized across field interactions.
The findings reveal a dual dynamic. AMM absorbs uncertainty by formalizing a possibilistic financial logic, organizing epistemic chaos into publicly debatable projections, embedding imagined futures in recurring field routines, and becoming a compulsory element of legitimate field participation. Yet it simultaneously amplifies uncertainty by legitimizing contradictory market imaginaries, institutionalizing speculative exuberance as rational calculation, embedding positional bias through socially differentiated adoption, and foreclosing learning through a logic immune to falsification. Together these dynamics generate a recursive model of performative coordination in which the device that enables collective investment also reproduces the volatility it seeks to contain.
Theoretically, the study advances institutional theory through the concept of calculative problem-solving, bridges fictional expectations and performativity theory by specifying how imagined futures acquire material durability, and extends performativity theory by distinguishing devices that destabilize through social practice embeddedness from those that destabilize through insulation from social reality.

Author

• Enlan Wang, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI