Search results for ""author michael t. hannan""

The world of wine encompasses endless variety. Consumers want to understand what makes one bottle of wine different from another; vintners need to know how to communicate what makes their product distinctive. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as well as interviews with critics and analysis of market data, Giacomo Negro, Michael T. Hannan, and Susan Olzak provide an unprecedented sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets. They demonstrate how the concepts of genre and collective identity illuminate producers’ choices, whether they are selling traditional or nonconventional wines.Winemakers face a fundamental choice: produce an existing style and develop an identity as a proponent of tradition or embrace foreign, new, or emerging categories and be seen as an innovator. To explain this dilemma, Negro, Hannan, and Olzak develop the notion of wine genres, or shared understandings among producers and the public. Genres emerge through the social structure of production, including factors such as group solidarity, social cohesion, and collective action, and become key reference points for critics and consumers. Wine Markets features case studies of the creation of a modern wine genre and a countermovement against modernism in Piedmont, the failure of producers of Brunello di Montalcino in Tuscany to define a clear collective identity, and the emergence of the biodynamic wine movement in Alsace. This book not only offers keen sociological insight into the wine world but also sheds new light on the logic of markets and organizations more broadly.

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The world of wine encompasses endless variety. Consumers want to understand what makes one bottle of wine different from another; vintners need to know how to communicate what makes their product distinctive. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Italy and France as well as interviews with critics and analysis of market data, Giacomo Negro, Michael T. Hannan, and Susan Olzak provide an unprecedented sociological account of the dynamics of wine markets. They demonstrate how the concepts of genre and collective identity illuminate producers’ choices, whether they are selling traditional or nonconventional wines.Winemakers face a fundamental choice: produce an existing style and develop an identity as a proponent of tradition or embrace foreign, new, or emerging categories and be seen as an innovator. To explain this dilemma, Negro, Hannan, and Olzak develop the notion of wine genres, or shared understandings among producers and the public. Genres emerge through the social structure of production, including factors such as group solidarity, social cohesion, and collective action, and become key reference points for critics and consumers. Wine Markets features case studies of the creation of a modern wine genre and a countermovement against modernism in Piedmont, the failure of producers of Brunello di Montalcino in Tuscany to define a clear collective identity, and the emergence of the biodynamic wine movement in Alsace. This book not only offers keen sociological insight into the wine world but also sheds new light on the logic of markets and organizations more broadly.

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Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have dramatically different expectations of companies that are categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and actions.In this book, a team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Drawing on research in various fields, including cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp, occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a “conceptual space.” Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental representations of categories. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts. Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new understanding of everyday situations and interactions.

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Building theories of organizations is challenging: theories are partial and "folk" categories are fuzzy. The commonly used tools--first-order logic and its foundational set theory--are ill-suited for handling these complications. Here, three leading authorities rethink organization theory. Logics of Organization Theory sets forth and applies a new language for theory building based on a nonmonotonic logic and fuzzy set theory. In doing so, not only does it mark a major advance in organizational theory, but it also draws lessons for theory building elsewhere in the social sciences. Organizational research typically analyzes organizations in categories such as "bank," "hospital," or "university." These categories have been treated as crisp analytical constructs designed by researchers. But sociologists increasingly view categories as constructed by audiences. This book builds on cognitive psychology and anthropology to develop an audience-based theory of organizational categories. It applies this framework and the new language of theory building to organizational ecology. It reconstructs and integrates four central theory fragments, and in so doing reveals unexpected connections and new insights.

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