2011/12/29 by Rodolphe Durand, Lionel Paolella · 302 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · #Business Strategy and Innovation #Categorical variable #Categorization #Cognition #Cognitive dimensions of notations #Computer science #Congruence (geometry) #Economics #Entrepreneurship #Epistemology #Innovation and Knowledge Management #Management #Management and Organizational Studies #Mediation #Organizational theory #Political science #Positive economics #Psychology #Reciprocal #Scholarship #Situational ethics #Social psychology #Social science #Sociology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2011.01039.x
published in Journal of Management Studies 50(6), 1100-1123 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2011/12/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
abstract We advocate for more tolerance in the manner we collectively address categories and categorization in our research. Drawing on the prototype view, organizational scholars have provided a ‘disciplining’ framework to explain how category membership shapes, impacts, and limits organizational success. By stretching the existing straightjacket of scholarship on categories, we point to other useful conceptualizations of categories – i.e. the causal‐model and the goal‐based approaches of categorization – and propose that depending on situational circumstances, and beyond a disciplining exercise, categories involve a cognitive test of congruence and a goal satisfying calculus. Unsettling the current consensus about categorical imperatives and market discipline, we suggest also that audiences may tolerate more often than previously thought organizations that blend, span, and stretch categories. We derive implications for research about multi‐category membership and mediation in markets, and suggest ways in which work on the theme of categories in the strategy, entrepreneurship, and managerial cognition literatures can be enriched.