Joyal and Street note in their paper on braided monoidal categories [Braided
tensor categories, Advances in Math. 102(1993) 20-78] that the 2-category V-Cat
of categories enriched over a braided monoidal category V is not itself braided
in any way that is based upon the braiding of V. The exception that they
mention is the case in which V is symmetric, which leads to V-Cat being
symmetric as well. The symmetry in V-Cat is based upon the symmetry of V. The
motivation behind this paper is in part to describe how these facts relating V
and V-Cat are in turn related to a categorical analogue of topological
delooping. To do so I need to pass to a more general setting than braided and
symmetric categories -- in fact the k-fold monoidal categories of Balteanu et
al in [Iterated Monoidal Categories, Adv. Math. 176(2003) 277-349]. It seems
that the analogy of loop spaces is a good guide for how to define the concept
of enrichment over various types of monoidal objects, including k-fold monoidal
categories and their higher dimensional counterparts. The main result is that
for V a k-fold monoidal category, V-Cat becomes a (k-1)-fold monoidal
2-category in a canonical way. In the next paper I indicate how this process
may be iterated by enriching over V-Cat, along the way defining the 3-category
of categories enriched over V-Cat. In future work I plan to make precise the
n-dimensional case and to show how the group completion of the nerve of V is
related to the loop space of the group completion of the nerve of V-Cat.
This paper is an abridged version of `Enrichment as categorical delooping I'
math.CT/0304026.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at
http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol4/agt-4-7.abs.htm