FELIX HONECKER
Felix successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "Innovating for and legitimating fintech: An ethnographic study of European blockchain communities" on April 18, 2024 at the University of Glasgow, UK.
The examination committee: Jan Recker, University of Hamburg (external) and Jan Breitsohl, University of Glasgow (internal).
Supervisory team: Dominic Chalmers (University of Glasgow), Minna Pikkarainen (University of Oulu), Nicola Anderson (FinTech Scotland)
In his thesis, Felix focussed on a central – yet underexplored – mechanism involved in converting technology hype into perceptions of legitimacy: technology evangelism. More specifically, this thesis develops an explanation for how hype inspires individuals and groups to evangelise on behalf of an emerging industry, and through which behaviours and activities these individuals in turn can contribute to a broader perception of legitimacy for the technology by which it is enabled.
It is an ethnogrpahic study in which Felix closely engaged and interacted with community members to find out how hype had influenced their decision to evangelise for the technology. Based on his findings, he proposes a multi-level model of hype-driven technology legitimation that consists of three main sequences: (1) a judgement change phase in which, driven by hype, individual evaluators adjust their personal assessment of a technology, (2) an evangelism phase in which, depending on the motivation for their judgement change, individuals engage in ‘missionary work’ to prompt others to change their judgements too, and (3) a judgement validation phase in which evangelist behaviours produce effects on the macro-level perception of technology legitimacy as expressed by judgement validation institutions.
Felix's PhD was part of the Marie S. Curie H2020 ETN project, LNETN, cordinated by Romeo V. Turcan.