W hen two groups of market actors differ in how to interpret a common label, each can make claims over the label. One categorical interpretation and the group that supports it risk disappearance if the rival interpretation gains ground. We argue that when members of the endangered category become partial defectors that span categories, their history presents challenges to the identity of nondefectors that will inhibit further change. Our empirical analysis of "traditionalism" and "modernism" in the making of Barolo and Barbaresco wines supports this argument.

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: widespread category spanning lowers categorical contrast-the sharpness of a category's boundaries.Lowered contrast blurs boundaries among categories due to the impairment of the comparison processes underlying evaluations and the growing disagreement about the meaning of the category. These processes lower the appeal of all products in a category and make it problematic for any offer to receive widespread acclaim. By making boundaries less salient, reduced contrast also lowers the advantages of category specialism. These propositions receive support in an analysis of style categories and ratings of Barolos and Barbarescos, elite Italian wines.

SummaryThe study of innovation in cultural industries has addressed primarily the role played by organizational and environmental determinants. Research on teams has shown that innovation also depends on team composition and related team-level processes. In this study we develop two hypotheses arguing that the introduction of newcomers, and new combinations of both newcomers and old-timers in teams show positive relationships with innovation. We test our theory in the U.S. feature film industry and consider genre innovation as our measure of innovation. We use data on 6446 motion pictures produced by the Hollywood Majors in the period 1929-1958 for our empirical analysis. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. IntroductionOrganizations' increasing reliance on teams puts forth the question about the relationship between team composition, creativity, and innovation. As defined by previous researchers, creativity is the production of novel and useful ideas in any domain, while innovation is the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization (Amabile, 1988;Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993). This relationship is particularly important for the cultural industries, i.e., industries that commingle elements of art and commerce and where artists and managers are both present at the input stages (Hirsch, 2000). Cultural industries generally offer creative goods that are subject to rapid obsolescence and seasonal variation, and whose chances of success are highly ambiguous, uncertain, and contradictory (Hirsch, 1972). In cultural industries, novel and innovative products are thus in great demand, and competition is driven by a search for novelty (Lampel, Lant, & Shamsie, 2000). Moreover, some cultural industries offer complex creative goods, i.e., creative outputs that require teams of diverse skilled and specialized workers, each bringing personal, and many times diverging, tastes with regard to the quality or configuration of the product (Caves, 2000). In cultural industries, managers face different constraints generated by both the economic need of delivering relatively standardized short life products to a volatile market seeking innovation, and by team composition, where members' different artistic values, individual characteristics, and expectations pose constraints in assembling the creative team (Caves, 2000). In this study we investigate how the mixing and matching of new members (newcomers) and experienced members (old-timers) affect innovation.The distinction between newcomers and old-timers is particularly relevant in temporary structures with intended short life spans, where teams and their members continually cycle and recycle (Arthur, 1994). According to March (1991), while newcomers enhance exploration, innovation, and the chances of finding more creative solutions to team problems, old-timers increase exploitation, inertial behavior, and resistance to new solutions. In the cultural industries, where 'consumers need familiarity to understand what they are offered, but they need novelty t...

The concept of a ''category'' and the social process of ''categorization'' occupy a crucial place in current theories of organizations. In this introductory chapter to Research in the Sociology of Organization's volume on Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution, we review published work in various streams of research and find that studies of organizational forms and identities, institutional logics, collective action frames, and product conceptual systems have key commonalities and predictable differences.

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