Category Stretching: Reorienting Research on Categories in Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Organization Theory

Rodolphe Durand () and Lionel Paolella
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Rodolphe Durand: GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Lionel Paolella: Cambridge Judge Business School - CAM - University of Cambridge [UK]

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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 audiences may tolerate more often than previously 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; causal-model theory; goal-based approach; prototype (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (78)

Published in Journal of Management Studies, 2013, 50 (6), pp.1100-1123. ⟨10.1111/j.1467-6486.2011.01039.x⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01026129

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2011.01039.x

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