The letter of the spirit: the legal construction of status-based authenticity claims

Join our Organisational Theory and Information Systems seminar

Speaker: Dr Hovig Tchalian, USC Marshall School of Business

About the seminar topic

Authenticity claims rooted in place, tradition and provenance are central to status-based competition. Yet how organisations construct and defend such claims through legal means remains underspecified; while research has examined the symbolic and discursive work that sustains authenticity, the legal register in which symbolic claims are converted into enforceable property interests has received comparatively little attention. We address this gap through a qualitative, comparative analysis of 2 lawsuits brought by the Scotch Whisky Association against Canadian distilleries between 2007 and 2022, drawing on court records, pleadings and trademark filings. We find that legal construction performs 3 distinctive functions for status-based authenticity claims: it concretises otherwise abstract claims about places, practices and qualities; it instantiates the legitimacy of markets that often originated as illicit ones; and it props up the boundaries of maturing categories. In sum, we show that organisations incrementally rework their argumentative strategies across cases, shifting between narrow, univocal claims about single terms and broader, multi-vocal claims about full vocabularies. The findings advance research on authenticity, status and categories by theorising how legal claims turn contestation into clarity, generating a ratcheting effect that can be deployed in subsequent claims.

Speaker bio

Hovig Tchalian uses mixed methods and computational tools to study how the social conversation around emerging technologies helps or hinders market creation. Hovig employs these methods to study large-scale emergence processes. His research focuses on nascent and specialty contexts, where the socio-cultural meaning of markets is especially prominent. In nascent contexts, Hovig studies the strategic efforts of auto manufacturers launching into the slow-growth Electric Vehicle (EV) category. In more established contexts, Hovig studies the influence of automation on upscale traditional handicrafts. There, he examines how the rise of digital technologies has redefined the production of specialty coffee and whisky, traditionally made by hand and by ‘feel’. Hovig and co-authors are also completing 2 papers that extend the study of social discourse in the direction of legitimacy and governance. In a conceptual paper influenced by recent social and institutional developments, he and co-authors identify and model 2 alternatives to specialist ‘credentialling’, or authoritative public statements of expertise: ‘social credentialling’ based on group identity; and ‘synthetic credentialling’ based on AI-generated knowledge.

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No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.