Grégoire CROIDIEU

"Existing category research tends to divorce categories from place. When considered at all, place is often relegated to the contextual background. We see at least three important elements of place that can inform our understanding of categories: first, categories are rooted in the materiality of place; second, those who inhabit a place often share a collective identity that can impart meaning to categories; third, places influence the collective action that underlies category processes. Accordingly, we call for categories “to be put in their place” in category research, by attending to the materialities, collective identities, and collective action present in place. We present an integrative framework for future research that links place, categories, and organizational outcomes, and suggest mechanisms that link these constructs."

Given innovation's chaotic nature, organizations struggle to make decisions when managing innovation. Both academics and practitioners hope artificial intelligence can solve this problem and provide a solution to support and rationalize innovation processes. The literature on this topic, however, is fragmented. The goal of this paper is to systematically review the literature to guide future research. We build on the garbage can model, as our findings reveal that the rationalizing influences of AI on innovation management as a decision-making process is varied. Our results reveal four main influences that pave the way for future research: AI augmenting rationality, AI augmenting creativity, AI renewing the organizing of innovation, and AI triggering new challenges. Taken together, these findings suggest AI is not a tool that uniformly optimizes innovation management and decision-making but rather, is best understood as a multifaceted solution, with intended and unintended rationalizing influences, in search of problems to solve.

In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide an illustrative overview of how food has been approached in organization studies. We focus on the organizing of food, that is the organizational efforts that leverage, shape and transform food. Against this backdrop, we distinguish the agency of organizations and the agency of food and explore their intersection. We argue that the ‘biomateriality’ of food, i.e. its biomaterial qualities, plays a distinctive role in shaping and affecting organizing and organizations. To do so, we present a conceptual framework for analysing food organizing, which highlights the biomateriality of food and its agentic effects on organizational efforts. Thus, we provide researchers with an analytical toolkit to disentangle the different agents (people, organizations, food itself) and the associated processes and mechanisms that play a role in food organizing. We use this analytical toolkit to introduce the different articles in the special issue and put forward some lines of future research.

Given the investment of public resources for supporting entrepreneurial growth, it is important to know whether such programs truly benefit innovative ventures. While prior research has indicated some benefits for growth outcomes, there is no clear consensus about the conditions for program effectiveness. We attribute this to the complex set of selection and treatment mechanisms associated with how programs navigate interlocking tradeoffs to maximize outcomes with their limited resources. To circumvent these challenges, policymakers often default to a “picking winners” approach based on past performance indicators. We develop and implement a carefully designed empirical strategy to determine whether this approach leads innovative ventures to achieve growth milestones and properly accounts for various observed and unobserved selection issues. We analyze data from the Small Business Development Center (SBDC), a government-sponsored program in the United States. Using a potential outcomes framework to investigate over 1,700 ventures that enrolled in SBDC advisory services from 2011 to 2016, we observe that treatment design is more crucial than selection for innovative firms to achieve growth. We found that treatment time and a client's willingness to learn collaboratively from their advisors are vital indicators of growth. Since treatment effectiveness is driven by support allocation, programs that desire to boost innovation outcomes must at a minimum formally prioritize innovation criteria to ensure these businesses receive sufficient support to address their growth objectives. Beyond this, we demonstrate that support effectiveness additionally depends on a willingness of participants to learn collaboratively by socializing their growth objectives with their advisors. Since even winners need to learn, programs must wrestle with the selection tradeoffs more acutely early on to ensure that the most promising clients can receive lengthier learning opportunities for growth.

Many actors claim to be experts of specialized knowledge, but for this expertise to be perceived as legitimate, other actors in the field must recognize them as authorities. Using an automated topic-model analysis of historical texts associated with the U.S. amateur radio operator movement between 1899 and 1927, we propose a process model for lay-expertise legitimation as an alternative to professionalization. While the professionalization account depends on specialized work, credentialing, and restrictive jurisdictional control by powerful field actors, our model emphasizes four mechanisms leading to lay-expert recognition: building an advanced collective competence, operating in an unrestricted public space, providing transformational social contributions, and expanding an original collective role identity. Our analysis shows how field expertise can be achieved outside of professional spaces by non-professionalized actors who master activities as a labor of love. Our work also reveals that lay-expertise recognition depends on the interplay between collective identities and collective competence among non-professional actors, and it addresses the shifting power dynamics when professional and non-professional actors coexist and strive for expertise recognition.

We analyze how institutional persistence unfolds. Building on an historical analysis of 3,307 bottle labels in the Bordeaux wine community, France, between 1924 and 2005, we find that the persistence of a chateau tradition requires considerable effort at maintenance. Instead of greater compression and taken-for-grantedness, we propose that expansion along multimodal carriers provides a marker of a deepening institutionalization. We underscore the role of community organizations in enabling a wine tradition to persist. The implications of our findings for institutional theory and multimodality research are discussed.

This paper studies how complex field-positions, characterized by combinations of structural and cultural mechanisms, are associated with the non-imitation of dominant field-level practices. Theoretically, the notion of complex field-position complements prior institutional research on fieldpositions and non-imitation, which focuses primarily on structural mechanisms. Our empirical study looks at 62 Australian fine-wines, using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to identify combinations of structural and cultural mechanisms associated with the non-imitation of Penfolds Grange, a role model in the Australian fine-wine field. We find three distinct complex field-positions-pioneers, strangers, and insulars- which occurred at different moments in the history of this field. We build on these findings to discuss the importance of complex field-positions as sources of positional opportunities, and their role in the development and persistence of diversity in organizational fields.

One of the enduring insights about early-stage creative efforts is that their prospects for success depend on their ability to overcome a variety of liabilities of newness. In our study, we address one aspect of such liabilities: the ability to communicate credible claims about the merits of an idea when raising the funds required for execution. The narratives employed during fundraising are both a vehicle for assembling details about nascent ideas and a structure for communicating them to a wider audience. With this communication, entrepreneurs signal information that potential backers use to evaluate the claims. We argue that using language to differentiate new creative projects from the status quo is beneficial because of signal clarity, but employing a language of accountability that discloses too much information (TMI) may actually backfire when raising funds in open settings. We test this argument by analyzing a sample of crowdfunding campaign texts and find evidence supportive of our predictions. These results advance the literature on entrepreneurial narratives and signaling, establish some baseline characteristics of donation- and reward-based crowdfunding sites, and reinvigorate the application of Stinchcombe’s arguments about the liabilities of newness within a contemporary context.

Our study explores the discursive strategies of legitimation that organizations employ as they occupy different positions in an emergent institutional field. By examining both the frame-alignment strategies and the frame targets of two organizations in the U.S. wireless telegraphy field, we show how an organization’s position – and its positional changes over time – affects the discursive strategies it uses to promote or protect its goals in the face of pressure from other field actors. Our results indicate that three distinct field positions – peripheral, central, and niche – are associated with three different legitimation strategies – which we label “robust,” “co-optive,” and “focused” – around which the discursive strategies coalesced. Organizations at the periphery attempt to break in to a field by employing a diverse range of frame-alignment strategies targeted toward a variety of relevant field actors. Those in a central position target fewer actors, but pursue a similar variety of frame-alignment strategies. Those in a niche position use fewer alignment strategies and target a smaller number of field-level actors. Our study enriches the literature on discursive strategies of legitimation by focusing on the ways in which central and non-central actors employ them, and the ways in which these strategies evolve alongside the field itself. More broadly, our work contributes to our understanding of discursive skills required to confront complex institutional pressures. These efforts depend on the interactive nature of discursive strategies from the vantage point of different field positions.

Entrepreneurial action is embedded within a variety of complex social structures, not all of which can be as easily defined or measured as macro-institutional or micro-individual characteristics. Nonetheless, these multilayered structures collectively hold rich insights—before now underexamined—into the actual causal mechanisms that affect entrepreneurial actions and outcomes. To address this problem, we call on researchers to broaden their levels of analysis and direct their focus to meso-level structures. Although meso-level social structures are widely studied independently, these intermediate levels are seldom integrated into existing multilevel models. We argue that meso-level structures offer untapped riches for enhancing multilevel entrepreneurial mechanisms and discuss how social groups, associations, and other collectives operating at a meso level can play a more distinct, integrative role between the two ends of the institutional spectrum. To provide practical guidance for pursuing such investigations, we adapt Coleman's bathtub model to form a robust framework that integrates micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. Our framework helps alleviate the shortcomings produced by an overdependence on either solely macro- or micro-level entrepreneurial mechanisms and offers fresh insights, as the intermediate level is more deeply integrated into this new framework.