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Abstract
In this paper we outline a key mechanism through which organizational fields are constituted. We suggest that in competitive fields, the market serves as a magnet around which groups of actors consolidate, and that cognition of markets occurs through the creation, distribution, and interpretation of a web of information about the "market." To illustrate our theory, we present a case study of the Billboard music chart from the commercial music industry to show that changes in either scope, methodology, or political tone with which market information is presented can provide a major jolt to the participants' understanding of their field.
(Field Formation; Sensemaking; Market Information Regimes; Music Industry)
What is taken to be real, is real in its consequences.
W.I. Thomas
The idea of field has attracted the attention of social scientists at least since Kurt Lewin (1951) showed the utility of this metaphor of magnetic attraction in understanding behavior in human groupings that are in the process of consolidating as recognized coherent systems. Institutional theorists have used the term "field" to denote formations of organizations that are similar, have common practices, or share a certain focus of attention such as a market. Drawing on a number of earlier uses, DiMaggio and Powell (1983, p. 148) define organizational fields as "those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products."
While very useful, this definition does not suggest the processes through which an aggregation of organizations comes to "constitute a recognized area of institutional life." This important question has received relatively little attention from institutional theorists. A number of case studies have gone some way towards improving our understanding of field formation (e.g., DiMaggio 1991, Leblibici et al. 1991), yet we still lack a general framework that explains the institutionalization of organizational fields. Such knowledge is especially critical for students of culture industries, since mutually defined boundaries and commonly shared practices constrain both cognition and action within such fields (Becker 1982).
In this paper we propose a framework to explain the process of field formation. The paper is organized in seven sections. In the first section, we develop three theoretical concepts central to...