Categories and Social Evaluations

Abstract One of the developments over the past twenty years in strategy and organisations research is the general recognition that participants in organisational fields such as industries and markets make sense of field conditions, events, and themselves partially through collective cognitive representations that summarise important similarities and differences among field actors and objects and parse them into subjective categories. Categorical representations both include (category members) and exclude (category non-members) and, thus, represent the basic identity distinctions that underpin organisational fields. This chapter maps the relationship between such representations and the structure and dynamics of social evaluations within organisational fields. Its goals are threefold. First, the chapter provides a brief review of the major research studies and themes on organisational categories that have emerged in the literature to inform our understanding of how such categories develop and function. Second, it examines research on this influence, and organises and systematises the consequences of category inclusion, exclusion, and spillovers. Third, it advances an agentic perspective to characterise how actors in fields are not passive category takers who simply accept the categorical memberships that others place upon them—they are also category makers who, if savvy enough, can strategically shape the categorical interpretations used by others to interpret their actions and characteristics. Ultimately, this underscores how categories are co-constructed by a variety of actors within a field, and it emphasises possibilities for strategic action. The chapter concludes by discussing possible lines of future research that we believe are especially promising.