Identities, Categories, and Clusters: A Study of Category Dynamics and Cluster Spanning in the Lebanese Newspaper Industry 1851-1974

Abstract

Organizational ecologists have always argued for the need to take account of the whole industry while studying how certain characteristics might affect the mortality of
organizations. They argued that concepts such as legitimacy and competition were the driving forces behind organizational dynamics. Recently, researchers have started to pay more attention to a usually ignored topic: audience perceptions. Legitimacy, for example, is no longer modeled as the number of organizations in a population. It is now
thought to be dependent on how audience members perceive these organizations. By bringing audience members into the picture, the topic of identity has become of central
importance. This thesis seeks to study how identities affect the life chances of organizations within the context of the Lebanese newspaper industry.