Organizational resources are dynamic: successful organizations carefully manage the evolution of their resources over time to create value and sustain competitive advantage. Modern organizations must develop increasingly complex, often digital, resources, to carve out distinctive niches and harness the benefits of scale and specialization. However, most strategy scholarship takes a static view of resources—asking which characteristics of a resource in situ can confer a competitive advantage—while very few studies explore how organizations manage the evolution of complex resources in practice. I investigate the evolution of complex resources by conceptualizing an important digital resource, Google Chrome, as a social-symbolic object and analyzing how organizational actors engage in social-symbolic work to develop and maintain the source code behind the popular web browser. My analysis is based on digital records of the Chrome team’s day-to-day work from Git and other open source tools. Based on my findings, I develop a process model of how social-symbolic work shapes the evolution of a complex digital resource. My model and findings contribute to the literatures on complex resources, digital technologies, and social-symbolic work.
