Categorization pervades economic life; products, services, firms and industries are continuously being classified by rivals, clients, experts and critics. A stream of research highlighting the importance of market and product categories for organizations and individuals has grown in importance during the past 40 years. This volume contains ten essays on categorization authored by some of the world's leading scholars within sociology of markets, organization theory, and strategy research. It opens with revisiting the influential theory of "the categorical imperative," and moves on to present...

This volume brings together some of the world's leading scholars of market categorization. Together, their contributions depict categorization as both a cognitive and a social process, tightly connected to actors involved, their specific acts, the entity being categorized, and the context and timing which inform these activities.