Publications
Publications
- 2023
- Academy of Management Proceedings
Moral Escalation: Contested Category Emergence and Its Consequences in the Toy Industry
By: Ryann Noe
Abstract
Preexisting research has outlined the cognitive, competitive, and economic barriers to market category emergence. Yet scholars have paid scant attention to the processes and consequences of moral resistance to nascent categories. Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of the emergence of the e-toy category in the U.S. (1998-2022), I develop theory on the within-category and industry-wide consequences of moral contestation. During this 25-year period, e-toys – physical toys that interact with digital devices – were persistently criticized by educators, child-development experts, and many parents for allegedly threatening children’s safety and development. By analyzing the framing contest of e-toys over time, I identify a process of “moral escalation” – a shift from cognitive to moral claim-making – which both advocates and adversaries adopted in order to advance or avert the category, respectively. I further demonstrate how this within-category escalation had spillover consequences for the industry at-large, facilitating the moralization of mature categories and enacting the entrepreneurial opportunity for novel counter-categories to emerge. Together, this study reveals how moral debate operates as a category-level mechanism of industry-level change, driving the segmentation of industries into moral hierarchies.
Keywords
Moral Sensibility; Market Entry and Exit; Product Positioning; Technology Industry; Consumer Products Industry
Citation
Noe, Ryann. "Moral Escalation: Contested Category Emergence and Its Consequences in the Toy Industry." Academy of Management Proceedings (2023).