E xecutives use market labels to position their firms within market categories. Yet this activity has been given scarce attention in the extant literature that widely assumes that market labels are simple, prescribed classification brackets that accurately represent firms' characteristics. By examining how and why executives use the nanotechnology label, we uncover three strategies: claiming, disassociating, and hedging. Comparing these strategies to firms' technological capabilities, we find that capabilities alone do not explain executives' label use. Instead, the data show that these strategies are driven by executives' aspiration to symbolically influence their firms' market categorization. In particular, executives' perception of the label's ambiguity, their avoidance of perceived credibility gaps, and their assessment of the label's signaling value shape their labeling strategies. In contrast to extant research, which suggests that executives should aim for coherence, we find that many executives hedge their affiliation with a nascent market label. Thus, our study shows that in ambiguous contexts, noncommitment to a market category may be a particularly prevalent strategy.

No abstract

This study finds that it is possible for organizations in emerging categories to resist stigmatization through discursive reconstruction of the central and distinctive characteristics of the category in question. We examined the emerging market of organic farming in Finland and discovered how resistance to stigmatization was both an internal and an external power struggle in the organic farming community. Over time, the label of organic farming was manipulated and the practice of farming was associated with more conventional and familiar contexts, while the stigma was diverted at the same time to biodynamic farming. We develop a process model for removal of stigma from a nascent category through stigma diversion. We find that stigma diversion forces the core community to (re)define themselves in relation to the excluded community and the mainstream. We also discuss how notoriety can be an individuating phenomenon that helps categorical members conduct identity work and contributes to stigma removal.

No abstract

Research in the sociology of science has increasingly begun to acknowledge the role that external influences play in shaping the boundaries and content of science. However, a scarce understanding still prevails with regard to the role of peripheral, popular movements in the emergence of scientific fields, and of professional fields in general. Through their attention to boundary work, scientific fields also provide a fruitful yet neglected context to study how actors engage in efforts to alter frames in order to adjust and negotiate community boundaries. This qualitative study of the emergence of the US nanotechnology field from 1986 to 2005 makes several contributions to knowledge about these issues. First, our study shows that peripheral, popular movements open up avenues for scientific fields by generating understanding and receptivity for novel ideas through story-telling, which gives rise to their cultural embeddedness. Second, we find that by capitalizing on such culturally embedded concepts, scientists make science particularly vulnerable to external interventions, limiting the effect of boundary work. Third, the study shows how usually persistent hierarchies between communities are tested, challenged, and reproduced in an emerging professional field. The study therefore provides understanding on how actors in the key communities are able to use framing to negotiate their positions and community boundaries within a complex, emergent field.