Destigmatization is an understudied social process in which the negative outcomes for a previously-stigmatized group improve. We hypothesize that during a period of destigmatization the effects of stigma persist more strongly for those stigmatized by association than for people directly...

"The world of wine encompasses endless variety. Consumers want to understand what makes one bottle of wine different from another; vintners need to know how to communicate what makes their product distinctive. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as well as interviews with...

We examine variation in intraprofessional status changes for employees displaced by organizational failure. We propose that failure-related reductions in bargaining power are moderated by individual status characteristics that influence potential employers' evaluations of job candidates and,...

Consumers, producers, critics, and other market agents rely on socially constructed categories like craft beers, houseware, collectibles, and thriller films for their understanding of products and producers in markets. Although organizational and sociological accounts often take such categories...

Previous studies show that producers that span category boundaries exhibit lower fit to category schemas, accumulate less expertise, and elicit negative reactions from both critics and consumers. We propose that the negative reaction to category spanning also depends on another mechanism:...