A general finding in economic and organizational sociology states that producers and products that span categories lose appeal to audiences. This paper argues that to assess the consequences of category spanning researchers need to take account of the relations among the categories spanned. We...

Why do organizations generally lose their competitive edge as they get older? Recent theory and research on the dynamics of audiences and categories in markets sheds some new light on issues of organizational obsolescence.

This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to model the dynamics of organizational mortality. The main theoretical contribution is a clarification of the relations between organizational fitness, endowment, organizational capital and mortality hazard. If the mortality hazard is a function...

We propose that category membership can operate as a collective market signal for quality. This requires that gaining category membership is more costly for low-quality producers. The strength of such signals increases with the distinctiveness, or contrast, of the category. Our empirical study...

This paper proposes that social categorization is driven by an ecological dynamic that operates in two planes: feature space and category space. It develops a theoretical model that links positions in feature space to label assignments in category space. The first part of the model predicts that...

Policy-making is a dynamic process in which policies can be changed in each period but continue in the absence of new legislation. We study a dynamic legislative bargaining game with an endogenous status quo where in each period a dollar is allocated with a proposal voted against the allocation...

Pubic policies such as reguation, antitrust, and international trade are the result of public politics--a competition over who gets what with government the arbiter of that competition. Policies are also chosen by private parties without the command or sanction of government. Private policies...

This paper integrates two perspectives on why producers who span categories suffer social and/or economic disadvantage. According to the audience-side perspective, audience members refer to established categories to make sense of producers; they perceive producers who incorporate features from...

This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a governing coalition and then influence the legislative bargaining over policies. Equilibria can involve active lobbying at both stages of the governing process....

We develop a unifying framework to integrate two of organizational sociology's theory fragments on categorization: typecasting and form emergence. Typecasting is a producer-level theory that considers the consequences producers face for specializing versus spanning across category boundaries....