The Faithful Infidel: Exploring Conformity and Deviance of Category Members
This dissertation explores the drivers of why organizations, as members of its market category, choose to conform or deviate from the category’s codes. In essence, codes are the social rules category members are expected to abide by and that underpin the very existence of a category. Given the importance of producer conformity in upholding a category’s continued existence, code deviance then seems a counterintuitive strategy to pursue. Nonetheless, organizations are known to defy codes in certain instances, sometimes even pairing the violation simultaneously with conformity to other codes. On top of this, organizations also seem to be able to strategically decide which codes they will abide by to a certain extent. Each of the three papers in this dissertation investigates why organizations may choose to either conform or deviate by, respectively, examining (1) the identity difference between the code violator with the potential adopter of the code violation, (2) the taken-for-grantedness of the category the organization is a part of, and (3) the individual status and organizational identity (insider-outsider) of the producer. The main overarching finding of this dissertation is that organizations will take into account both its internal resources and external socio-environment to decide which strategy it will deploy and whether it can afford to do so. All in all, this dissertation specifies how the three factors mentioned may affect an organization’s propensity to conform or violate to category codes.
categories, codes, Islamic banking, identity, violation, conformity
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