Hype: How We Promise, Expect, and Evaluate a Future

Hype has been researched across many scholarly domains, including an increasing interest within management scholarship. While it is generally understood that hype involves rapidly increasing expectations of perceived value that could lead to overvaluation, there is a lack of cohesion around the best approach to theorize and research the phenomenon. The most direct hype theorizing in management literature recommends that hype should be theorized as a structural resource, yet research in legitimacy and entrepreneurial resource mobilization literatures suggest that hype could be a strategic resource as well as generated through a strategic or structural process. Additionally, extant research tends to view technology as a subject of hype rather than an input. And while expectation dynamics included in process models plot expectations over time, the temporal relationship of hype may be undertheorized. This panel of distinguished scholars aims to discuss these tensions and gaps in order to begin laying the theoretical foundation needed to explore this phenomenon as management scholars.