The (un)Making of Digital IT Services? Category Work and the Dynamics of Plausible Categories

Abstract

Our interpretive study of the contested rise of ‘digital’ services in the global information technology (IT) services industry during 2011-20 sheds light on how the ordinary and autonomous engagement of producers with a plausible category may shape the formation of the said category, i.e., its meaning and distinctiveness. Focusing on a subtler form of producer agency than the purposeful agency of category promoters often discussed in the existing literature, we analyze the claims made to the plausible ‘digital IT services’ category by eight IT services firms in their quarterly earnings calls over the span of a decade (2011-20). We argue that the articulation of category claims constitutes category work towards the settling or the unsettling of the meaning and the distinctiveness of the focal category. Apart from identifying four mechanisms (juxtaposition, projection, reproduction and revision) of such category work that is distinct from the better-understood and more conspicuous acts of category entrepreneurship, our study also contributes to developing a vocabulary to understand plausible categories which may linger in a liminal state of emergence and, thus, do not neatly align with the binary sensibility of emergence / non-emergence extant in the category formation literature.