Temporal Dynamics in Categorization: Typecasting and Entry-Driven Legitimation1

This paper proposes a unifying framework to integrate two of economic sociology’s theory fragments on categorization: typecasting and entry-driven legitimation. Typecasting is a producer-level argument that considers the consequences for producers of earlier affiliation with one category on the chances of success in another. Entry-driven legitimation considers how the attributes of producers entering a category shape its likelihood of gaining legitimacy among relevant audiences. Both theory fragments treat the processes by which audiences assign category memberships to producers and emphasize the importance of temporal sequences of these assignments. In this paper, we develop this common foundation and develop a theory that explains the central empirical findings of the two approaches. We formalize these arguments using modal expressions to represent key categorization processes.