Sub-theme 68: Spacing Out: The Nexus of Sociocognitive and Spatial Positioning for Organizations and Markets -> MERGED with sub-theme 45

Convenors:

Call for Papers


A growing literature points to the sociocognitive roots that shape organizations and markets (e.g., Kaplan, 2011; Durand et al., 2017; Cattani, Sands, Porac, & Greenberg, 2018). Key to this line of work is understanding how shared mental models impact and shape producer decisions (Porac, Thomas, Wilson, Paton, & Kanfer, 1995; Cattani, Porac, & Thomas, 2017) and audience-based evaluations (Hsu and Hannan, 2005). Various theoretical perspectives have originated from these premises, including work on categories  (Negro, Koçak, & Hsu, 2010; Montauti & Wezel, 2016; Durand, Granqvist, & Tyllström, 2017), labels (Zunino, Suarez, & Grodal, 2019; Granqvist, Grodal, & Woolley, 2012), optimal distinctiveness (Zuckerman, 2016; Zhao & Glynn, 2022), and institutional entrepreneurship (Khaire & Wadhwani, 2010; Jones, Maoret, Massa, & Svejenova, 2012), all aimed to improve our knowledge of the sociocognitive determinants of organization and market-level outcomes.
 
Across these perspectives, organizational features/attributes may be juxtaposed against one another in a sociocognitive space, “whose dimensions are the features that people use as the mental representations of the concept” (Hannan et al., 2019: 111; Grodal & Kahl, 2017). Positioning organizations in sociocognitive space informs concepts of similarity (Negro, Hannan, & Rao, 2011), distinctiveness (Haans, 2019), ambiguity (Boulongne & Durand, 2021), typicality (Sonenshein, Nault, & Obodaru, 2017), and deviance (Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2005). The sociocognitive space in which organizations are compared is consequential for competitive sensemaking, resource acquisitions, and social evaluations.
 
A full consideration of the impact of the sociocognitive space, however, cannot ignore the physical space in which organizations operate and markets are contextualized. Social mechanisms contribute to the enduring influence of communities (Marquis & Battilana, 2009) as well as to the emergence of regional identities (Romanelli & Khessina, 2005). This is due to the fact that, from a cognitive standpoint, physical proximity between objects profoundly effects similarity assessments (Casasanto, 2008; Boot & Pecher, 2010). These insights have been applied to organizations, finding that geographic proximity affects competition between organizations (Wezel et al., 2006), practice diffusion (Lounsbury, 2007), and location choice (Dupin & Wezel, 2023; Beck et al., 2019). At a more micro level, research at the intersection of strategy and marketing has examined the behavioral consequences of physical proximity in advertisement placements (Kim & Kim, 2022) and shelf space (Giarratana et al., 2021).
 
Yet the scattering of this research across different research camps has hampered a thorough understanding of how physical and sociocognitive positioning interact in shaping organizations and markets, and special attention is required for potential opportunities to integrate theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. To this aim, we invite submissions to this sub-theme from scholars with different theoretical backgrounds, taking either a producer- or audience-based view, aimed at investigating a wide range of outcomes relevant to organizations and markets. We also hope to bring together submissions using diverse methodological approaches (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, mixed) and multiple levels of analysis. Questions that may be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • How can different theoretical perspectives be mobilized to improve our understanding of the intersection between sociocognitive and spatial positioning?

  • What is the influence of a producer’s physical positioning on a producer’s positioning in sociocognitive space?

  • How does the interaction between sociocognitive and geographic positioning affect organizational and/or market-level outcomes?

  • How can sociocognitive and/or physical positioning be leveraged strategically to affect audiences’ perceptions and evaluations? How do such evaluations impact the organizational ability to access critical resources?

  • How can established and/or new methodological approaches be leveraged to enhance the investigation of the sociocognitive positioning and its interaction with physical/geographic positioning?

 


References


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