The short history and long future of research on market categories
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The market categories literature is reaching the adolescent stage. To ‘look forward’ and chart the next stages of this literature’s growth, we first need to ‘look back’ at what we have learned so far. We thus begin with a systematic review of the literature on market categories from the 1990s to the present. Our search of leading management and sociology journals yielded 100 empirical papers, which we group into eight themes. We then discuss in more detail the findings under the top three of these themes: category spanning, new category construction and category change. Based on our review, we then ‘look forward’ and offer suggestions for future research on market categories. Specifically, we call for more explicit attention to (1) agency, particularly in studies of category spanning, (2) market categories at the intersection of multiple institutional logics, (3) market categories as an outcome rather than antecedent and (4) construct clarity and consistency. We hope these recommendations will ensure a long and healthy future for this burgeoning literature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it