Legitimizing illegitimacy: How creating market identity legitimizes illegitimate products
Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution
ISBN: 978-0-85724-593-9, eISBN: 978-0-85724-594-6
Publication date: 21 December 2010
Abstract
This study focuses on how the creation of a new market identity, defined here by the social categories that specify what to expect of products and organizations, helps legitimize normatively illegitimate products and thereby facilitate the formation of markets for these products. A product is given a legitimate market identity by recombining existing product and status categories in a way that is both isomorphic with and differentiated from these preexisting categories. I argue that the creation of a new market identity helped create a market for feature films that combined legitimate comedy and illegitimate pornography following the legalization of pornography in Denmark in 1969. Topological analyses of the cultural content of all the film posters used to promote Danish films between 1970 and 1978, and regression analyses of the status of the actors appearing in these films document the importance of market identity in legitimizing illegitimacy.
Citation
Jensen, M. (2010), "Legitimizing illegitimacy: How creating market identity legitimizes illegitimate products", Hsu, G., Negro, G. and Koçak, Ö. (Ed.) Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 31), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 39-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2010)0000031004
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited