We’re delighted to introduce our new workshop series, BrainSTORM.

BrainSTORM is intended for presentations of early stage research, ranging from rough ideas to pre-submission papers. We are expecting presentations of projects for which advice is sought before to engage into empirics, discussions aimed at refining research questions, first drafts of papers before submission to conferences or journals, etc.

BrainSTORM thus fills a gap in our portfolio, which includes external seminars (aka “STORM proudly presents”), and PDWs for submitted papers, whether those have received an R&R or have been rejected (aka “LSR2”, for “Let’s STORM Reviewer 2”).

Our inaugural BrainSTORM meeting will be held Thursday 6 June, 12:00-13:30 in room A422. We will have the pleasure to discuss Laura Dupin’s work on location choices by bakers in Lyon. See the abstract below. Registered attendees will receive a copy of the paper in advance and will have free food awaiting them in the room.
To register, please send an email to Thinley Tharchen: tharchen@em-lyon.com.
All are welcome!

Organizational identities are often represented as claims of membership into static classification orders. Audience members are assumed to actively evaluate these claims, either directly through input-output linkages (i.e. you do what you say you do) or indirectly through social evaluation (i.e. you are what you say you are), sanctioning producers that do not satisfy categorical expectations.  However under conditions when identity claims and labels are legitimate and taken-for-granted, audiences are less likely to scrutinize.  This passive acquiescence opens up the opportunity for misalignment between producers’ actual features and those perceived by audiences.  Under this scenario, we argue that producers may develop competing craft ontologies, or salient beliefs about a normative ‘right’ way of producing something that transfers to routines, competences and skills not easily acknowledged by passive audiences.  Competing craft ontologies distill to organizations being either purists – categorical incumbents representing the traditional routines foundational to the categorical schema orpragmatists – offshoots of the purist form that recombine traditional production processes with modern elements. We expect that pragmatists largely benefit from taken-for-grantedness, and try to maintain low scrutiny by minimizing any differences with purists. However purists, as categorical incumbents, are expected to oppose pragmatist inclusion in the category and search to enhance organizational differences to audiences.  Using quantitative data of 177 market entries of artisanal bakeries within the city of Lyon (1998-2017), we find that purists seek to differentiate themselves by continuing identity lineages, whereas pragmatists are motivated to maintain a seamless integration by a habitualized market entry. Second, we find a significant difference in how each craft ontology chooses locations as a function of distance to the nearest oppositional entity. Purists prioritized locations closer to pragmatists in order to contrast their identity as categorical incumbents. Pragmatists, instead, prioritize locating farther from other pragmatists and less concerned about distancing themselves from purists. The contributions of our study to the pertinent literatures are discussed.