Consumers, producers, critics, and other market agents rely on socially constructed categories like craft beers, houseware, collectibles, and thriller films for their understanding of products and producers in markets. Although organizational and sociological accounts often take such categories...

The concept of a “category” and the social process of “categorization” occupy a crucial place in current theories of organizations. In this introductory chapter to Research in the Sociology of Organization's volume on Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution, we review published work...