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Archival data are linguistic texts, visuals, and artifacts that actors create in and around organization. Archival data have historically been used to supplement other types of qualitative data. However, the use of archival data in qualitative analysis has dramatically increased due to digitalization. Archival data raises new methodological opportunities and challenges that qualitative field methods do not address; in particular, the abundance and heterogeneity of archival data. These features prompt us to rethink how we both sample and theorize using this data. This paper proposes a framework we call "dynamic theorizing," which emphasizes the need to iterate between sampling and theoretical simplification. Our framework brings iterative sampling front and center as part of generating and simplifying theoretical insights. Our framework enables novel research which expands beyond qualitative research's traditional boundaries [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This panel symposium aims to advance research on market categories and categorization by highlighting the role of heterogeneity and interplay among market participants. Specifically, we explore how both the actors' and audiences' heterogeneity and their interactions may influence evaluation outcomes and shape category dynamics. In doing so, we extend the scope of category studies by engaging recent scholarship in cultural entrepreneurship and social evaluations. This symposium brings together a group of six scholars, comprising five panelists and a distinguished discussant, renowned for their expertise in this area. They will provide profound insights into the implications of actor and audience heterogeneity for our understanding of categories and categorization. Our goal is to underscore the dynamic aspect and inherent heterogeneity among market participants in categories research, explore different methodological approaches, and consider new directions for future work in this area of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hype has been researched across many scholarly domains, including an increasing interest within management scholarship. While it is generally understood that hype involves rapidly increasing expectations of perceived value that could lead to overvaluation, there is a lack of cohesion around the best approach to theorize and research the phenomenon. The most direct hype theorizing in management literature recommends that hype should be theorized as a structural resource, yet research in legitimacy and entrepreneurial resource mobilization literatures suggest that hype could be a strategic resource as well as generated through a strategic or structural process. Additionally, extant research tends to view technology as a subject of hype rather than an input. And while expectation dynamics included in process models plot expectations over time, the temporal relationship of hype may be undertheorized. This panel of distinguished scholars aims to discuss these tensions and gaps in order to begin laying the theoretical foundation needed to explore this phenomenon as management scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do industries emerge and evolve? This is a key question in organizational theory, which over the last half a century has been addressed through a variety of theoretical perspectives. However, these perspectives have mostly developed in isolation. Recently, different scholarly communities have seen a reinvigoration of the study of industry evolution with scholars engaging in combining elements from different perspectives as well as advancing new research agendas within the perspectives. The goal of this panel symposium is to stimulate a conversation between scholars representing each of these perspectives, to further encourage cross-pollination of perspectives. To achieve this, we have asked a scholar representing one of four different traditions to talk briefly about their view on industry evolution, and point to future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This panel symposium brings together a set of prominent scholars to discuss recent and future research with regards to developing a temporality lens to study technology emergence and development. Traditionally, the literature on technology emergence and development has tended to treat time as a continuous and unidimensional construct -- as a backdrop or a timeline. Lately, scholars have begun to challenge these assumptions and explore the multiple ways in which temporality -- as culturally founded and socially construed understandings of time -- shape technologies. The focus then moves to temporal perceptions, meanings and practices and even systemic and institutionalized features, and how these impact various aspects of technology emergence and development. The panelists present complementary perspectives to understand and explore such phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Symposium sheds new light on entrepreneurial pivoting from key theoretical and methodological perspectives. Pivoting is a critical activity that many emerging organizations undertake but often ends in failure. Bringing together leading scholars, this Symposium explores (1) the triggers of pivoting, (2) core organizational pivoting processes that span levels of analysis (identity, legitimacy, and ecosystem management), and (3) the process methods that enable scholars to study pivoting in a fine-grained, longitudinal manner. The session will start with an introduction to the frontiers of pivoting research, and then feature insights from each of the panelists, followed by an integrative Q&A discussion session with the audience. The Symposium intends to inspire lively intellectual discussion and equip scholars to advance the nascent research on the important but understudied phenomenon of entrepreneurial pivoting. By advancing scholarship on the process of pivoting, we also hope to inspire further research on the processes by which new ventures become fully- fledged organizations that contribute to resilient societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories within organizational and economic sociology that center on market categories often equate taken-for-grantedness with increased constraint on the features of category members. In contrast, we develop a novel perspective that considers how market participants' changing category-related attributions decrease their scrutiny of category offerings, opening up strategic opportunities for firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbolic management literature explores how executives signal both substantive and symbolic properties of a firm. In contrast, market categorization literature suggests that firms are often at the mercy of stakeholders who categorize the firm based on its substantive features. Such tensions present in these literatures indicate that our knowledge on where agency lies in market categorization, and whether the process of categorization is based on substantive or symbolic features, is still inconclusive. Focusing on established markets, these literatures have cast little light on how nascent market labels and market categories are constructed and used. Our research addresses these gaps in the literature by providing insight into the dimensions that shape executives' propensity to use a nascent market label. Based on an in-depth grounded analysis of executives' use of the nanotechnology label, we identify the key dimensions for constructing the meaning of a nascent market label. The data show that depending on this construction, executives employ three labeling techniques: claiming, hedging and disassociating. The findings show that how executives simultaneously construct the market label and decide upon the strategies for its use impacts the embedding of the nascent label in the market place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology disruption is a central topic in management theory. For a new product to disrupt an existing product consumers need to view these products as substitutes. However, despite the centrality of product substitution in technology disruption there is scant knowledge of how perceptions of product similarity shapes technology disruption. Indeed, in most studies, product substitution is either black-boxed or it is inferred retrospectively when one product replaces the other in the market, causing a disruption. We conducted an inductive qualitative study of e-cigarettes which experts, such as producers and financial analysts, predicted would displace cigarettes. However, this disruption never occurred, instead e-cigarettes became popular with another user group. We suggest that differences in how experts and users judge the similarity of the old and the new technology spur differences in determining whether the product is a good substitute or not. We found that while experts relied on their expertise to judge similarity between existing and new technology along technological aspects, users judged similarity of the existing and the new technology according to their cultural knowledge and social embeddedness. This paper extends theories of technology disruption by introducing a socio-cognitive perspective of technology disruption, which emphasizes that similarity judgements by multiple market stakeholders as an important element in whether disruption will occur or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research has explored the profound impact technologies may have on individuals, organizations, and industries. Recently, scholars have emphasized that multiple groups of actors--many with varying perspectives--participate in the field surrounding a new technology. The existence of different perspectives on the technology influences outcomes for the technology and the involved individuals, organizations, and industries. As the actors that participate in technological fields often reside within different organizations, it becomes important to explore how technologies are used and understood across organizational boundaries. Therefore, we seek to facilitate a conversation around how organizational members and market participants understand and use technologies across organizational boundaries. This perspective across boundaries helps scholars to consider the broad implications of new technologies which span boundaries more frequently, such as digital technologies that gather data across organizations and individuals. In this panel symposium, we bring together experts in technology to facilitate discussions on the impact of technologies across boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of organizational fields occupies a central position in organizational studies and strategy research. A rich array of scholars has studied the emergence of fields bottom-up, through the actions of grassroots activists. Others have called attention to the importance of top-down intervention to preclude framing contests and hasten field emergence, especially in the case of urgent and pressing grand challenges. Still others have focused on dynamics that operate in the wider ecosystem and on how these influence the emergence of fields. This symposium brings together scholarly contributions from all these different points of view to answer the question, How do such dynamics that occur at different levels (micro, macro, ecosystem) interact to influence the emergence and reconfiguration of fields from their origins to their maturation? In particular, what are the limits of bottom-up field emergence and when might top-down intervention be warranted? What are the advantages and disadvantages associated with top-down field emergence especially in the case of grand challenges, and when might such top-down initiatives be challenged or fall apart? Finally, how do dynamics in the wider ecosystem (e.g., norms, biases, developments in adjacent or distant fields) influence a focal field's emergence and, at times, require its radical reconfiguration? * Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Processes of Field (non)-Emergence: The Case of the Biofuels Field * Presenter: Marco Clemente; IESEG School of Management (LEM-CNRS 9221) * Presenter: Aleksios Gotsopoulos; SKK Graduate School of Business * Presenter: Robin Gustafsson; Aalto U. * Seeding Upheaval: Explaining Proximate Field Influence in the Ontario Wine Region, 1811-2013 * Presenter: Felipe Gorenstein Massa; Loyola U. New Orleans * Presenter: Maxim Voronov; Schulich School of Business * Presenter: Dirk De Clercq; Brock U. * Presenter: C. R. Hinings; U. of Calgary * Junkies, Queers and Babies: Achieving Category Coherence During the Evolution of the Category AIDS * Presenter: Miyoung Chang; Boston U. Questrom School of Business * Presenter: Stine Grodal; Northeastern U. * Me, Myself, & I:The Maintenance of Petty Institutionalized Corruption in an Era of Collective Crises * Presenter: Patricia Helena Hein; EBS U. für Wirtschaft und Recht * Presenter: Shahzad Ansari; Cambridge U. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digitalization of textual data has spurred a dramatic growth in the availability of archival data. This new data captures both our ongoing digital life and stretches back in time as historical archives are digitalized and made available to the public. The availability of archival data raises new methodological opportunities and challenges for qualitative researchers who aim to generate organizational theory. Drawing on archival materials allows researchers to study the actual textual actions that actors--e.g. people, organizations or markets--make and to track them over time. This allows for textual ethnography where we (unlike in interviews but similar to traditional ethnography) are able to examine the interaction between actors in real time. Unlike both ethnography and interviews the use of archival data allows us to cross both time and space to study the unfolding of organizational phenomena not only across long time periods and in years passed but also across different spatial locations. Finally, archival data allows us to trace phenomena only manifest in aggregated patterns that is not readily observed with an ethnographic gaze. Yet, with these new empirical opportunities also come new challenges which arise both from the heterogeneity and extensiveness of the data. To rise to this challenge, this symposium brings together a set of scholars familiar with using archival data for qualitative analysis to discuss various methodological approaches for collecting and analyzing archival data and the consequences these methodological choices have for theory development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research interests in categories and categorization has grown significantly in recent years, but only in recent years have researchers begun to pay closer attention to social context and social process, and particularly to the social practices through which categories, in particularly categories of innovative products, or new phenomena are enacted and made concrete. The current symposium takes on this challenge by addressing several questions at the frontier of categories research: (1) how do categories interact with core organizational processes and how does the meaning of categories interacts with other organization constructs such as routines, identity, and structure through organizational practices, (2) how are categories anchored in market, professional practices or embodied in cultural and material practices, (3) how are categories instantiated in communicative practices and discourse, (4) how are organizational actors and their actions constraint by categories and how may these actors escape or decouple from the reach of categories and categorization. Category Dimensions and Category Coherence. Presenter: Stine Grodal; Northeastern U. Presenter: Miyoung Chang; Boston U. Questrom School of Business. What does contact tracing really mean? How governments and citizens contest the meaning of contact t. Presenter: Semi Min; New York U. The Interplay of Language, Materiality, and Practices in the Creation of the Plant-based Meat Catego. Presenter: Eunice Yunjin Rhee; Seattle U. An Inhabited View of Categorization. Presenter: Enlan Wang; U. of Southern California. Presenter: Peer Fiss; U. of Southern California. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When an existing market space is challenged by creative disruptions (Schumpeter, 1942), organizations need to strategically re-position themselves in both material and value space. Material space encompasses an innovation's physical attribute, practice, or design, whereas value space represents how the innovation is judged, evaluated, or imbued with meanings. Navigating these two spaces simultaneously can be difficult. This symposium seeks to understand how firms manage conflicts across material space and value space during technological innovation. We include four papers to examine how 1) firms bring values to technological innovation through technology positioning in material space, and how 2) institutional structures that establish orders for material space affect valuation of technological innovation during commercialization. These four papers employ a variety of methods -- ranging from archival, qualitative, and quantitative -- to study these issues. Authors of this symposium are experts on the proposed theme and have extensively published on innovation, value, and meaning creation. We believe this symposium will advance the field by proposing a holistic approach to examine technological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have shown that professionals construct their identity around specialized knowledge. When this knowledge is replaced, changed, or threatened by an outside group, their identity can be challenged. However, how professionals react when they experience a sudden void of specialized knowledge--that is, when there is no specialized knowledge available to help them carry out their professional duties-- remains unexplored. We address this gap by asking how professionals reconstruct their identity in the absence of specialized knowledge. We carried out an inductive study by drawing on the oral histories of 80 physicians at the front lines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S. As the epidemic progressed, physicians questioned and later reframed the role of both specialized knowledge and emotions in their professional work. Most notably, we found that emotions were constitutive of the professionals' identity, in that physicians integrated emotions into the very definition of what it meant to be a doctor. Professionals identify themselves by "who they are" and "what they do;" our study shows that "how they feel" is also integral to professional identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rich body of "cultural entrepreneurship" research has matured over the last decade, offering unique insights into the meaning-making and cultural processes by which market categories shape, and are shaped by, entrepreneurial action. Although cultural entrepreneurship research recognizes that actors must construct the meaning-system that underpins emerging categories, early research on the topic typically assumed that categories stabilize once they become established. More recently, a growing body of work has begun to question whether the boundaries and underlying meanings that underpin categories are ever really settled, suggesting a need for a more dynamic understanding of market category evolution. Thus, the primary goal of this symposium is to further our understanding of how actors shape the trajectories that market categories may take, outlining fruitful avenues for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categories are cognitive structures that field participants to use to understand their environments. Category prototypes, which are the most representative part of a category, play an important role in the process of category emergence. However, previous studies on category emergence paid little attention to the role of prototype evolution. In particular, there is little research on how category prototypes are shaped by the inclusion or exclusion of heterogeneous exemplars. This process is important because some exemplars have more salient features than others and carry stronger socio-cultural meanings. In order to shed light on this understudied process, we draw on an inductive study of how medical professionals constructed the novel category AIDS from 1978 to 1985. In contrast to the existing literature which views prototypes as functional for the classification process, we find that prototypes based on salient exemplars are a double-edged sword. The early focus on salient exemplars might facilitate identifying the emergence of a new category. However, later on the same salient exemplars create biases which hinder the inclusion of less salient exemplars, particularly ones that have socio-cultural meanings that conflict with the emerging prototype. We thus show that the categorization process is messier and more non-linear than assumed in prior studies. More generally our study expands the existing literature by integrating theories of materiality and socio-cultural meanings into categorization theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has emphasized that signaling clear membership in product categories influences how products perform. In this paper we focus on two shortcomings in the categorization literature. First, while prior literature has focused primarily on category labels as signals of categorical membership, other mechanisms that communicate association to a category-such as semantic networks and images-have been under-researched. We draw on the literature on multi-modal processing of information to explain how text-based mechanisms such as the use of labels and semantic networks differ from visual-based mechanisms such as the use of images. Second, the prior literature has overlooked the asymmetry in the effect of positive and negative labels on performance. We draw on an extensive literature within psychology to argue that negative labels have a stronger effect on performance than positive labels. Using original data from the crowdfunding website Indiegogo from 2010 to 2015, we find that both text-based mechanisms, semantic networks and labels, and visual mechanisms of signaling category membership are associated with performance. Our findings also suggest that images convey category membership by activating different cognitive structures than text. Furthermore, we find that labels with negative valence have a stronger effect on performance than positive labels. Our study theorizes and provides empirical support for a more complete understanding of how producers can signal categorical membership to shape the performance of their products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essential building block of qualitative analysis is categorizing data into constructs. Yet, while categorization theory is blossoming in other disciplines its central insights have, surprisingly, not been applied to qualitative analysis. In published work scholars often assert that their analytical process occurs by merging lower-level constructs into higher-level ones. We challenge this approach and showcase how a broader set of analytical moves prevalent within categorization theory can help generate better theory. Building theories from qualitative data often necessitates analyzing heterogenous data that encompass multiple perspectives and temporalities; generating categories from such data is messy and can rarely be accomplished exclusively by merging. We develop a framework showing how relying on multiple analytical moves when handling heterogenous data fosters better theory. In addition to the merging move, we identify several other analytical moves'e.g., asking questions, splitting constructs and sequencing constructs'and link them to theory development. We also spell out the promise of the multiple-moves framework by relating it to various temporal stages or goals of a research study. Ultimately, our framework provides researchers with a diverse and flexible set of analytical moves that can be used to interrogate data and to better align methods and theory development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This summer we celebrate the 40 years anniversary of the publication of Abernathy and Utterback's (1978) fundamental article on the industry lifecycle, which opened a fruitful avenue of research that continues to be relevant today. In this panel symposium we take stock of the research that has unfolded over the last 40 years, placing particular emphasis on the reinvigoration of industry lifecycle research that occured in the last decade. During this period, we have seen a large number of papers, from different scholarly traditions and different methodologies, that have greatly expanded the classical work that fleshed out what we know today as industry evolution theory: Abernathy & Utterback 1978; Anderson & Tushman 1990; Klepper 1997. Some of the more recent work has focused on the structural characteristics and strategic dynamics of the industry lifecycle, such as the role of submarkets in the industry lifecycle (Klepper & Thompson, 2006), the emergence of innovation shocks and the role of knowledge inheritance (Argyres, Bigelow, & Nickerson, 2015), the possibility of strategic reorientations during industry evolution (Eggers, 2012), and the importance of R&D collaborations (Kapoor & McGrath, 2014). Another recent research stream has uncovered the socio-cognitive dynamics of the industry lifecycle. This stream of research has identified the existence of a dominant category (Suarez, Grodal and Gotsopoulos, 2015), and elaborated on the co-evolution of categories and technologies (Grodal, Gotsopoulos, and Suarez, 2015). In this panel symposium we discuss these and other new directions of industry lifecycle research and elaborate on paths for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations are increasing confronting developments that force them to become better at imagining distant future and past time horizons and bring them into their business models, dominated by short-term business horizons. While it has always been a challenge for organizations to make long-term strategies actionable, this symposium explores how organizations are navigating to find ways of translating temporal extremities that go way beyond the 3-5 year strategic horizon. No matter whether they are oriented towards the past or the future, this implies that the distance between the present and past/future time horizons is expanded dramatically. At the same time, organizations are confronted with financial performance pressure from investors and shareholder activism, which together lead to an even more restricted short-termism. Together the panel will cover the topic of how organizations translate temporal extremities departing from first a future and then a past perspective, whereas the discussion aims to address how they also may be combined in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categories affect competitive dynamics. Despite progress in understanding categorization dynamics in markets, to date only few studies take into account the linguistic nature of category labels in explaining their adoption. We integrate research from psycholinguistics to study how the linguistic structure of category labels shape their adoption in a market. In particular, we theorize about the importance of the number of cognitive components in a category label, the length of a category label, the speed at which the category label can be pronounced, and the use of spatially unified compounds (e.g. "smartphone" vs. "smart phone") in influencing label adoption. We find that label adoption is increased with labels that have fewer cognitive components, are shorter, can be pronounced more quickly, and those whose components are unified. Our results remain consistent both in an archival investigation with data from the smartphone industry and in two online experiments. Our results provide a novel perspective to the literatures of categorization and industry evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competition is a core question in management theory. Over the last decades scholars have made much progress in understanding the underlying dynamics of competition with large consequences for firm strategy. Yet, many theories of competition take for granted that market boundaries exist and do not problematize how firms might differentiate within markets with blurry boundaries. Market boundaries and competition are based on market stakeholder socio-cognitive understandings. In this panel symposium we begin to question how recent theories of categorization and the socio-cognitive dynamics of product markets and theories of competition might influence each other. We have assembled a panel of researchers who come from different disciplinary backgrounds but have in common their interest in understanding questions at the intersection of categorization and competition.   [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]