Category Stretching: Reorienting Research on Categories in Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Organization Theory
Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 50, Issue 6, pp. 1100-1123, 2013
24 Pages Posted: 5 Jan 2012 Last revised: 15 Aug 2014
Date Written: September 1, 2013
Abstract
We advocate for more tolerance in the manner we collectively address categories and categorization in our research. Drawing on the prototype view, organizational scholars have provided a ‘disciplining’ framework to explain how category membership shapes, impacts and limits organizational success. By stretching the existing straightjacket of scholarship on categories, we point to other useful conceptualizations of categories – i.e. the causal model and the goal-based approaches of categorization – and propose that depending on situational circumstances, and beyond a disciplining exercise, categories involve a cognitive test of congruence and a goal satisfying calculus. Unsettling the current consensus about categorical imperatives and market discipline, we suggest also that markets may tolerate more often than thought organizations that blend, span, and stretch categories. We derive implications for research about multi-category membership and mediation in markets, and suggest ways in which work on the theme of categories in the strategy, entrepreneurship, and managerial cognition literatures can be enriched.
Keywords: categories, prototype, causal model, goal-based model
JEL Classification: M00
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
The Global Financial Crisis: An Institutional Theory Analysis
By Suhaib Riaz
-
Jules or Jim: Alternative Conformity to Minority Logics
By Rodolphe Durand and Julien Jourdan
-
By Thomas J. Roulet and Samuel Touboul
-
Institutional Work Amidst the Financial Crisis: Emerging Positions of Elite Actors
By Suhaib Riaz, Sean Buchanan, ...
-
By Tyler Wry and Michael Lounsbury
-
Categorizing Categorization Research: Review, Integration, and Future Directions
By Jean-philippe Vergne and Tyler Wry
-
Asset Divestment as a Response to Media Attacks in Stigmatized Industries