Category Stretching: Reorienting Research on Categories in Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Organization Theory

TLDR

Drawing on the prototype view, organizational scholars have provided a ‘disciplining’ framework to explain how category membership shapes, impacts, and limits organizational success. The authors aim to broaden the treatment of categories by advocating tolerance, proposing alternative conceptualizations such as causal and goal-based models, and arguing that markets may more readily accept organizations that blend, span, and stretch categories. They extend category theory by integrating causal and goal-based models, framing categories as cognitive congruence tests and goal-satisfying calculations, and deriving implications for multi-category membership and mediation research. The study finds that markets may more readily accept organizations that blend, span, and stretch categories, offering new insights for research on multi-category membership and mediation.

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 markets may tolerate more often than 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.