How to turn a Cinderella product into a market queen

The case of Italian grappa shows that more than marketing is needed to raise a product's market status, write Giuseppe Delmestri and Royston Greenwoo

How Cinderella Became a Queen: Theorizing Radical Status Change

Using a case study of the Italian spirit grappa, we examine status recategorization - the vertical extension and reclassification of an entire market category. Grappa was historically a low-status product, but in the 1970s one regional distiller took steps that led to a radical break from its traditional image, so that in just over a decade high-quality grappa became an exemplar of cultured Italian lifestyle and held a market position in the same class as cognac and whisky. We use this context to articulate "theorization by allusion", which occurs through three mechanisms: category detachment-distancing a social object from its existing category; category emulation-presenting that object so that it hints at the practices of a high-status category; and category sublimation-shifting from local, field-specific references to broader, societal-level frames. This novel theorization is particularly appropriate for explaining change from low to high status because it avoids resistance to and contestation of such change (by customers, media, and other sources) as a result of status imperatives, which may be especially strong in mature fields. Unlike prior studies that have examined the status of organizations within a category, ours foregrounds shifts in the status and social meaning of a market category itself

Institutionen, Technik und Ökonomie : eine organisationstheoretische Untersuchung des deutschen und italienischen Maschinenbaus

Deutschland ; Maschinenbauindustrie ; Unternehmen ; Organisationsstruktur ; Italie

Institutional Streams, Logics and Fields

Ideology is discussed as the missing link between material practices and symbolic constructions in defining institutional logics. Institutional streams are proposed as disembedded institutional logics traveling as ideologies that are taken for granted. They affect specific (inter)action contexts on a global level providing institutional entrepreneurs and workers with symbolic elements to translate into local institutional arrangements. Such translations can give rise to institutional change. Local translation of nonlocal elements advances the interests of the elites of the “sending” institutional context, as well as it may advance those of the receiving one. Dominant transnational streams may or may not coalesce to form a global world order

Institutional Theory

The chapter presents a institutional theory. Institutional theory, a building block of today’s organization studies, drawing from sociology, social psychology, political science, and economics, offers explanations for social order, social action and cultural persistence. It does it with regard both to the stability of social systems at various levels (i.e. organization, field, society, world), and to the effects of institutional processes in situations of change or of conflicting legal, cultural or normative jurisdictions. Institutional theory highlights the role of rules, norms, and typifications (cultural beliefs and scripts) in constraining and empowering social action and giving meaning to social life. Earlier contributions emphasized the stabilizing role of institutions through the constitution of structures, organizational forms, fields and social actors’ identities. More recent contributions draw attention to the concurrent role of institutions in situations of change, where interests, agency and power play their own role in reaching stability or domination

Streams of Inconsistent Institutional Influences: Middle Managers as Carriers of Multiple Identities

Conceiving institutional effects as occurring within the boundaries of predefined institutional environments, spaces or fields leaves little leeway for understanding transnational phenomena of interaction, competition and overlapping jurisdiction of ideas, norms and regulations of multiple origin. I propose here the metaphor of intersecting institutional streams, which influence social actors due to their different origin, strength and fluidity. Thanks to a new understanding of the interaction between roles, institutionalized identities and the self, I refer to individuals not as cultural and institutional dopes, but as able, in varying degrees, to participate in multiple cultural traditions and to maintain distinctive and inconsistent action frames. I collected quantitative information on 418 Italian middle managers, working for local and international firms in Italy, and qualitative information on 113 of them. The majority in international firms enacted Anglo-Saxon identities, and more so in US and British firms; hybridizations occurred with positively perceived aspects of Italian institutions. The majority in Italian firms enacted a traditional Italian identity. Enactment was dependent on characteristics of the role (hierarchical level, international interconnectedness) and on the degree of identification with the international firm?s culture. The latter was spurred by the global integrated use of HRM practices

Determinants of real and rhetoric change: Top managers’identities, (trans)national institutions and management fashions

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