THREE STUDIES AT THE INTERSECTION OF MARKET CATEGORIZATION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTION

Abstract

This dissertation is organized around three individual but interrelated studies. Study 1 is a review, integration, and extension of market categorization theory in which I offer an evolutionary framework of market categorization by juxtaposing three theoretical perspectives found in the literature—structural, strategic, and constructionist—with the three categorization stages of formation, development, and decline. By theorizing cross-perspective categorization mechanisms, as well as the conditions and tensions in category transitions, the review offers research opportunities, some of which form the basis for Study 2 and Study 3. Study 2 is a microhistorical examination of the evolution of electronic dance music in the United States between 1979 and 2012 that builds theory about culturally rooted categories. I offer a theoretical model of grassroots hybridization that explains the sociocultural and sociocognitive mechanisms through which category insiders, guided by a nonmarket ethos, drive the categorization process from the bottom-up by constructing the culturally rooted category in the underground, preventing top-down co-optation efforts from category outsiders, and partially integrating the category into the mainstream market. Study 3 is a quantitative examination of the influence of category prototyping on a category’s market traction. I develop the concept of category prototyping as the initial combination of novel prototype attributes and their subsequent recombination with familiar prototype attributes, hypothesizing that attribute combination influences market traction indirectly through attribute recombination. I also examine the moderating role of media as category intermediary. Analyzing the entire lifecycle of electronic dance music between 1979 and 2023 and employing Generalized Simultaneous Equation Model, I find support for my hypotheses. A formal mediation test confirms the mediation effects.