CANCELLED: Seminar – A Macro Perspective on Status Dynamics: the Hollowing and Hallowing of the Haute Couture Category

The Organisational Theory & Information Systems subject group regrets that this seminar has been cancelled.

Professor Déborah Philippe, University of Lausanne

Unlike prior organisational status research that has dedicated significant attention to the dynamics underlying status-based market interactions and the potential sources of alterations in actors’ status positions, we examine the status dynamics of an entire field. Building on the categorical nature of many status orders and using a case study of the French high-end fashion field, we investigate, in the context of an evolving status order, the categorical work taken to enact and preserve a category’s status over time. This setting is characterised by a sophisticated, stratified system of categories and key actors actively contributing to the construction and alteration of these categories. Focusing on the haute couture category since 1911, we show how, over time, the field’s main professional association attempted to juggle two imperatives that became increasingly at odds: maintaining the category status and ensuring the category’s survival. Our findings contribute to the status literature by showing how status orders can be purposefully altered by the actors immersed in them. Our study also contributes to research on categories by showing that the categorical work at the level of one category affects and is affected by the work of other actors at other levels of the category system. Finally, we show how a category can be repurposed to maintain its viability, thereby contributing to recent debates on the persistence of categories.

Speaker bio

Déborah Philippe is Professor of Strategy in the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne. She holds a PhD in strategy and management from HEC Paris (2009). Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of organisation theory, economic sociology, and strategy. She investigates the role of social evaluations (i.e. status, legitimacy, reputation, and stigma) in shaping organisations’ strategic behaviour. Specifically, she looks at organisations’ strategic behaviour to manage social evaluations and at the impact of these social evaluations on inter-organisational dynamics.