The emergence, stabilization, and destabilization of resources: Gated reverb and the sound of the 80s

B2B marketing scholarship has begun to question the traditional perspective of resources as stable entities that are ‘out there’ for firms to be acquired, transformed, or leveraged to create value. It has instead begun to adopt a more processual perspective emphasizing resources as situational phenomena that come into existence through their use and may also fade away again. While such a process-relational perspective holds great promise to advance B2B resource thinking, it is still nascent, being marked by lingering conceptual inconsistencies and a relative lack of empirical research. Against this backdrop, our study explores the process of resource emergence, stabilization and destabilization, by drawing on the revelatory case study of the “gated reverb drum sound”, popularly known as “the sound of the 80s”. Using archival and primary data, we develop a process model that shows how resources emerge, gain traction and decline over time by moving through four phases: discovering, prototyping, commodifying, and overusing. We illuminate the material-discursive practices making up these phases, and the resource characteristics they enact at different points in time. Our findings provide a new way of thinking about the lifecycle of resources, and the involvement of humans and non-humans in this process, with significant implications for theory and practice.