Writing the Playbook: The Codification and Transformation of Entrepreneurial Claims on Kickstarter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Categories provide a rich register of cultural elements that entrepreneurial actors mobilize to make their endeavors amenable to interested audiences, such as resource providers. But why are some cultural elements routinely invoked, while others emerge or fall out of use? To theorize the codification and transformation of cultural registers, i.e., the set of cultural elements associated with a given product category, we map how entrepreneurial claims evolved on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Using a computer-assisted qualitative approach, we analyzed the content of 65,871 crowdfunding campaigns launched across six product categories over 11 years. From our analysis, we build a process model explaining when and how entrepreneurial actors collectively enrich and prune their cultural registers, codifying some elements as central to a category while casting others as more peripheral. Extending recent insights, which have begun to challenge the dominant two-step model of category formation, we seek to explain how collective yet uncoordinated action may reinforce or reformulate the shared understanding of a given category.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".