Never Really One of Us: Commitment-based Typecasting among Knit Designers

Abstract

Even when a novice participates in multiple market categories, we often observe the candidate struggle to gain recognition as fit for one or more of those categories. In this paper, we argue and show that suggest that such a candidate may be screened out of one category not because her participation in multiple categories suggest she lacks skills but because it suggests she is not committed to the category. Our theoretical contribution is to show that such “commitment-based typecasting” has two characteristic features: asymmetry in audience valuation and retrospective reevaluation. When a novice performer experiences an “identity shock” that suggests that she is more committed to the audience for one category than another–that audience is confirmed in its prior assessment of the candidate while the second, “betrayed” audience tends to regard her as having always been less committed to the rival audience/category. We test this theory in the domain of knitting, where there is a divide between avant-garde knitters and traditional knitters, and we show that when a novice knit designer is first published in the publication associated with one category, this elicits a retrospective devaluation of her prior work by the audience of the opposing category.