Special Issue of Strategic Organization: “Categories and Place: Materiality, Identities, and Movements”

Abstract

Categories are social constructions that differentiate among entities, such as products, people, and organizations (Lamont and Molnár, 2002). Established categories reflect a shared understanding about the inclusion of objects into groups and thereby locate entities within a broader system of meaning or classification (Durand and Boulongne, 2017: 647). At the intersection of the fields of strategic management and organization theory, considerable research on categories has focused on established category systems and the antecedents and consequences of an entity's positioning within these systems, such as studies of category spanning or straddling (Zuckerman, 1999;