Processes and industry turning points. Critical phases at the actors' and market's levels

The paper dives into the controversies that make markets, exploring the processes at play behind the renewal of competitive landscape. The analysis of such processes is complex for several reasons: because they happen in environments riddled with ambiguities, because they involve temporal dynamics and because discourses and actions are not always coherent with each other. To explore the period of doubts that can shake markets, a typology of critical phases is proposed to see how processes entangle at two levels: the one of actors (firms, customers, ranking institutions, legislators) and the one of markets (where actors interact). The paper makes use of two major controversies that have shaken the US defense industry since the end of the Cold War to discuss selected aspects of the processes suggested by the typology, in particular the interplay between the different critical phases.