“Category Thickness”: Descriptive and Evaluative Ambiguities as Determinants of Strategic Category

Abstract

Research in market categories and in social evaluations underline that market actors use categories as strategic tools and that strategic categorization implies a certain degree of categorical ambiguity. While research on categories have mostly focused on the ambiguity regarding the category’s meaning, or the “descriptive ambiguity”, an overlooked dimension explaining strategic categorization is the ambiguity regarding the category’s valence, or the “evaluative ambiguity”. In philosophy, the categories that mix descriptive and evaluative ambiguities are called “thick”, as opposed to “thin” that are either purely descriptive or purely evaluative. This conceptual paper studies how the combination of descriptive and evaluative ambiguities explains producers’ strategic category affiliation. In doing so, it offers contributions in research on market categories and social evaluations.