Concepts and Categories

Michael T. Hannan is the StrataCom Professor of Management emeritus in the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and professor emeritus of sociology at Stanford University.Gaël Le Mens is professor of behavioral science in the Department of Economics and Business at Pompeu Fabra University.Greta Hsu is professor of management at the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management.Balázs Kovács is assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale University School of Management.Giacomo Negro is professor of organization and management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.László Pólos is professor of organizational theory at Durham University Business School.Elizabeth Pontikes is associate professor of management at the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management.Amanda J. Sharkey is associate professor of organizations and strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

• PrefaceAcknowledgments1. Concepts in Sociological AnalysisPart I. Concepts and Spaces2. Preliminaries3. Semantic Space4. Concepts as Probability Densities in Semantic Space5. Conceptual Spaces: Domains and Cohorts6. Expanding Spaces to Compare Concepts7. Informativeness and DistinctivenessPart II. Applying Concepts8. Categories and Categorization9. Free Categorization10. Concepts, Perception, and InferencePart III. Bridges to Sociological Application11. Conceptual Ambiguity and Contrast12. ValuationPart IV. Concepts in Social Interaction13. The Group Level: Conceptual and Extensional Agreement14. Social Inference and Taken-for-Grantedness15. Broadening the Scope of ApplicationPart V. AppendixesAppendix A: Glossary of Technical TermsAppendix B: Some Elemental First-Order LogicAppendix C: ProofsNotesBibliographyIndex

Social classification—the establishment of categories and the sorting of entities into those categories—is the critical juncture at which cognition and social organization intersect. As such, it is a central topic that cuts across many fields of sociology and other social sciences. This volume integrates work from the most productive and promising program of theory and research on social classification into a coherent statement that will inform sociological thinking for years to come.