Research across disciplines presumes that markets will have strong boundaries. Markets without well-defined boundaries typically are not useful and do not become institutionalized, so are expected to fade away. In contrast, we suggest that in many contexts lenient markets or market labels with...

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...

Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) are increasingly using collaborative tactics to engage firms. Implications of this are not well understood by researchers. This study investigates one risk that looms over such collaborations: if the corporate partner is later implicated in an industry...

This study investigates concept innovation, when firms create new market category labels to differentiate their products. Data suggest that concept innovation is frequent. But little is known about its antecedents. This study proposes that concept innovation is based both on recombinant...