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Consumers, producers, critics, and other market agents rely on
socially constructed categories like 'craft' beers, houseware
'collectibles', and 'thriller' films for their understanding of
products and producers in markets. Although organizational and
sociological accounts often take such categories as given,
researchers increasingly acknowledge that category emergence,
development, and functioning represent key aspects of how markets
work. Take, for example, the U.S. brewing industry, which has
become segmented into mass versus specialty producers. Many beer
lovers who appreciate the characteristics of a beer made by small,
specialty breweries are not willing to buy an equivalent beer made
by an integrated, major producer. Knowledge of what specialty beer
has come to mean and represent to consumers as the product of an
authentic, artisanal production process and delivery is crucial for
our understanding of how this market and competitive dynamics
within it have evolved. This volume focuses on how market
categories shape processes of production and consumption and how
these activities in turn shape category systems. This volume
consists of original contributions to theory and empirical research
by a diverse group of esteemed authors. Topics explored include how
new categories emerge, become enacted and gain consensus, how
categories are used by market agents (including as tools for
interpretation, as mobilization frames, and as cognitive
infrastructures for learning), and how category systems change over
time. These topics are explored from a variety of perspectives: new
institutional theory, organizational ecology, social movement
theory, and socio-cognitive theories of markets. The breadth of
perspectives in this volume attests to the importance of this topic
to sociological studies of market processes.
Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently
to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take
positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have
dramatically different expectations of companies that are
categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media
sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of
how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give
meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and
actions. In this book, a team of sociologists presents a
groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide
sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social
situations. Drawing on research in various fields, including
cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the
book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that
concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp,
occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a "conceptual space."
Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental
representations of categories. Using this model, important yet
commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be
quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts.
Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal
theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an
eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled
experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how
explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new
understanding of everyday situations and interactions.
The world of wine encompasses endless variety. Consumers want to
understand what makes one bottle of wine different from another;
vintners need to know how to communicate what makes their product
distinctive. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France
as well as interviews with critics and analysis of market data,
Giacomo Negro, Michael T. Hannan, and Susan Olzak provide an
unprecedented sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets.
They demonstrate how the concepts of genre and collective identity
illuminate producers' choices, whether they are selling traditional
or nonconventional wines. Winemakers face a fundamental choice:
produce an existing style and develop an identity as a proponent of
tradition or embrace foreign, new, or emerging categories and be
seen as an innovator. To explain this dilemma, Negro, Hannan, and
Olzak develop the notion of wine genres, or shared understandings
among producers and the public. Genres emerge through the social
structure of production, including factors such as group
solidarity, social cohesion, and collective action, and become key
reference points for critics and consumers. Wine Markets features
case studies of the creation of a modern wine genre and a
countermovement against modernism in Piedmont, the failure of
producers of Brunello di Montalcino in Tuscany to define a clear
collective identity, and the emergence of the biodynamic wine
movement in Alsace. This book not only offers keen sociological
insight into the wine world but also sheds new light on the logic
of markets and organizations more broadly.
The world of wine encompasses endless variety. Consumers want to
understand what makes one bottle of wine different from another;
vintners need to know how to communicate what makes their product
distinctive. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France
as well as interviews with critics and analysis of market data,
Giacomo Negro, Michael T. Hannan, and Susan Olzak provide an
unprecedented sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets.
They demonstrate how the concepts of genre and collective identity
illuminate producers' choices, whether they are selling traditional
or nonconventional wines. Winemakers face a fundamental choice:
produce an existing style and develop an identity as a proponent of
tradition or embrace foreign, new, or emerging categories and be
seen as an innovator. To explain this dilemma, Negro, Hannan, and
Olzak develop the notion of wine genres, or shared understandings
among producers and the public. Genres emerge through the social
structure of production, including factors such as group
solidarity, social cohesion, and collective action, and become key
reference points for critics and consumers. Wine Markets features
case studies of the creation of a modern wine genre and a
countermovement against modernism in Piedmont, the failure of
producers of Brunello di Montalcino in Tuscany to define a clear
collective identity, and the emergence of the biodynamic wine
movement in Alsace. This book not only offers keen sociological
insight into the wine world but also sheds new light on the logic
of markets and organizations more broadly.
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