UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation examines esports content teams, competitive teams that broadcast their practice sessions and internal operations live to public audiences while competing in sanctioned leagues, as an emergent organizational form that joins radical transparency to hybrid organizing. Drawing on structuration theory, the study integrates team adaptation theory, institutional work theory, institutional logics, and platform affordances into a two-level framework in which transparency and hybridity operate as modalities linking team-level interaction and field-level structure. I followed three League of Legends content teams, Los Ratones, Near Airport, and The Ruddy Sack, from founding to ending between November 2024 and March 2026, combining a comparative case study design with netnographic observation: 152 hours of streamed practice observation documented in systematic field notes, the teams’ complete published record, and a cleaned archival corpus of 121,468 records from Reddit, YouTube, Twitter/X, and the esports press, analyzed through theory-anchored qualitative coding with calibrated and audited computational assistance.The findings show that radical transparency reconstitutes team adaptation itself. The teams developed capabilities that exist because their work is visible: public diagnosis work, protected formulation practices such as principled abstraction and channel switching, coordination discipline under observation, and learning conducted on the record. The same practices simultaneously functioned as institutional work performed without governance authority. By demonstrating, disrupting, and maintaining the form in public, the teams created the content team category, challenged the field norm of strategic secrecy, and, in dissolving, publicly specified the form’s limiting conditions of member commitment, member orientation, audience scale, founder position, and institutional accommodation. Team adaptation and institutional work recursively constituted each other through four communicative integration points, and the form ended where its two modalities were separated.The dissertation contributes to team adaptation theory, institutional work theory, organizational transparency research, hybrid organizing, and the structurational and communicative study of institutions, and it demonstrates a fully unobtrusive, comparative, corpus-scale qualitative design for studying organizations whose life is constitutively public.