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We examine how the organizational identity of established firms affects their strategic outcomes during the emergence phase of a new market. Drawing on cognitive theories of analogical learning, we build theory about how the established identities of producers influence the fluency with which consumers make sense of novel products, and hence affect valuations. We illustrate this theory through an empirical study of consumer evaluations of de alio entrants during the emergence of the digital camera industry.

With growing interest in the penalties associated with straddling market categories, it is important to develop a stock of evidence about the relative importance of consideration and valuation penalties in different empirical settings. In this chapter, we isolate the possible adverse implications for currently kosher Israeli wine producers that were established as non-kosher producers. Our analysis suggests that crossing the kosher categorical boundary exposes these producers to experience-based penalties that are reflected in lower product quality ratings. However, we find no evidence of additional penalties associated either with consideration (i.e., market access) or with the possession of a convoluted organizational identity.

In current research on market categories, hybridity (i.e., the association of organizations and/or the products they offer with multiple category memberships) represents an important issue with many practical implications, especially for project-based forms of organizations. This chapter explores the evolution of hybridity and the conditions under which different kinds of project-based organizations develop hybrid projects. By studying the feature film industry in the United States from 1920 until 1970, this chapter contrasts the current perspective based on status-organizing processes and suggests that hybridity is a population-level process that can be interpreted as the result of the construction and interplay of different identities, and on the dynamic of the identity dimensions employed by different actors in such effort. The chapter shows that the development and construction of the identity of a temporary organization is different from other types of organizations, and is linked to identification processes both at the organizational level, with the company or with specific individuals in key roles, and at the institutional/collective level, with pure (single-category) and hybrid (multi-category) genres. This chapter highlights the mutual interactions and constraints between these two levels in different life stages of the film industry.

Consecration represents the most definitive form of legitimation in every cultural field. Complementing previous research focused on individual, contextual, and structural conditions underpinning consecration, this paper takes a sequence analytical perspective and explores whether diverse creative trajectories are more frequently associated with consecration. We introduce the notion of signature style and the pace of category spanning as key features for consecration. We argue that a consecrated signature style is just as likely to result from a producer’s adherence to a specific style over time or from a consistent (and fast-paced) category-spanning creative trajectory. The resulting identity will be specialist in the first case, eclectic in the second. We analyze the stylistic trajectories of 863 electronic music artists and find robust support to our hypothesis. The analysis is corroborated by further exploratory findings that identify intriguing questions for future research. By examining the organization of creative journeys in the career of cultural producers, this paper emphasizes the importance of considering the unfolding and rhythm of creativity over time. This temporal perspective sheds new light on the dynamics of distinctiveness and consecration in cultural fields.

The concept of a “category” and the social process of “categorization” occupy a crucial place in current theories of organizations. In this introductory chapter to Research in the Sociology of Organization's volume on Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution, we review published work in various streams of research and find that studies of organizational forms and identities, institutional logics, collective action frames, and product conceptual systems have key commonalities and predictable differences.

Purpose – This study is intended to extend scholarship on the management of organizations by examining the long-term performance of orphaned products.

Design/methodology/approach – This study uses the historical context of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression to examine the long-run appeal (performance) of orphaned products – products from start-ups that fail soon after production. I use this setting to determine how factors within the purview of management, as well as the role of changing tastes, affect the appeal of music from short-lived start-ups founded in 1929 and 1933.

Findings/originality/value – I find that while the evolution of tastes has a substantial effect beyond the control of a firm's managers, a start-up's decision-makers were able to positively influence the long-run appeal of music when they (a) recorded tunes with new artists and (b) were able to create an early big hit with the tune. These results demonstrate how and why, even with cultural producers in one of the greatest economic disasters in U.S. history, managerial decisions were meaningful for product performance. Finally, I show that the effect of being a start-up on the long-run appeal of a tune is time-varying such that being a start-up in 1929 or 1933 does not harm a tune's appeal until after World War II. These final analyses point to further ways in which strategy, history, and sociology might combine to further scholarship on the management of organizations.

The concept of style is gaining momentum in organizational research. Focussing on its implications for strategy, this paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework to make the notion of style operational and applicable to both research and practice. Style is defined here as a combinatorial, socially situated and semiotic device that can be organized into typologies – recurrent combinations of stylistic dimensions exerting a normative and semiotic function within and across contexts. The empirical analysis, situated in the field of electronic music, considers the music genres and the colour dimension of artists' appearance as components of their style. Results show how coherent style typologies normatively dominate the field and how non-conformist but coherent typologies correspond to superior creative performance. Operating as unifying device, style can transform varied and potentially confounding traits into distinctiveness and shed light on competitive market dynamics that cannot be fully explained via other theoretical constructs.

We explore how the long-run success of cultural products is affected by the identities of the product's originators and early adopters. Using U.S. jazz recordings from 1920 to 1929, we found that songs were more likely to be later covered from 1944 to 2004 if they followed a pattern of having black originators and white early adopters. Moreover, we provide evidence that this pattern is independent of a song's commercial success, resources available to a song's originators, and group-level indicators such as size and experience. We conclude that late adopters (musicians after World War II (WWII)) were attracted to songs that followed a narrative of both “lowbrow” origins and early adoption by those considered “highbrow” with respect to jazz. The findings also support a new means for considering the role of identities as the building blocks of genres, in particular, and categories more generally.

To be denied the status of formal worker is to be denied the rights and protections of the formal sector. Such classification is a source of insecurity and uncertainty for many. When employers privilege disembedded employment arrangements, workers in precarious semi-formal settings face many financial and relational challenges, yet receive limited support. In hostile economic, social, and legal contexts, what practices and discourses do these workers draw on to respond to their work situations? When, and against whom, do they struggle for labor embeddedness? Analyses of ethnographic and interview data from two fieldwork projects studying semi-formal work – one study of inmate labor in a US prison and one of a local independent culture industry – reveal that workers engage in collective and independent classification struggles in search of formal and symbolic reclassification. A typology of such struggles is presented. By viewing these practices through this lens, this chapter aims to reveal parallels in the experiences of workers in seemingly disconnected fields and advance our understanding of worker action and embeddedness in contemporary capitalism.

Although the host, the future body of Christ in the Catholic Eucharist, seems to lie completely outside of the economic system, it needs to be produced and sold. The majority of host producers are female monasteries for which the production process brings double tension: as an economic activity within a religious utopia (the monastery) and as the economization of something that is considered to be a religious good. This double tension provokes the question, how do the nuns legitimate this economic process in their monastery without desacralizing the symbolic good? Trying to answer this question, nuns typically deny the economic dimension of production and transaction, yet the sheer existence of this economy proves it is accepted. This chapter examines the relationship between economy and religion through an analysis of the ambivalence in the production and marketing process of altar bread.