Research suggests there are significant market penalties for organizations that do not conform to category boundaries in their product offerings. Yet, organizations continue to span categories despite these risks. In this study, we shed insight into why by examining factors that shape the...

This paper introduces modal logics to a sociological audience. We first provide an overview of the formal properties of this family of models and outline key differences with classical first-order logic. We then build a model to represent processes of perception and belief core to social...

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....

We examine how the life chances and financial performance of nascent high-technology firms were affected by two kinds of organizational changes: altering founders' blueprints for the employment relation and replacing a founder--chief executive officer (CEO) by an outsider. We argue that both...

This article explores the constraints evaluative schemas place on critics' allocation of attention. Prior research suggests that a critic's ability to establish himself as an expert of the market is based on the appeal to a rationalized and defensible system of standards for evaluating products....

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...