Research summary: A ttaining optimal distinctiveness—positive stakeholder perceptions
about a firm's strategic position that reconciles competing demands for differentiation and …

This review assembles two highly referenced streams of research in organization and
management studies over the past decade: institutional logics and categories. We present …

Cultural schemas are a central cognitive mechanism through which culture affects action. In
this article, we develop a theoretical model of cultural schemas that is better able to support …

Background: The electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) industry has grown in size and
organizational complexity in recent years, most notably with the entry of major tobacco …

When a new industry category is predicated on a product or activity subject to “core” stigma—
meaning its very nature is stigmatized—the actors trying to establish it may struggle to gain …

Drawing from Goffman's original observations on stigma and the consequences of
interactions between the stigmatized and supportive or stigmatizing audiences, we conduct …

This paper reviews several streams of research on market category formation. Most past
research has largely focused on established category systems and the antecedents and …

In this paper, we develop an exemplar-based model of the emergence and evolution of
proto-categories—new grou**s of products that are only weakly entrenched but have the …

In the previous chapter, we have proposed that fluency increases with typicality and
decreases with conceptual ambiguity (postulate 11.2). When the object has been …

Beside making organizations look like their peers through the adoption of similar attributes
(“alignment”), this paper highlights the fact that conformity also enables organizations to …