The emergence of a new organizational field: Labels, meaning and emotions in nanotechnology

Organizational theory has matured to a point where we know much about how organizational fields, once formed, evolve. We know less about how new organizational fields emerge. This dissertation provides a social-political account of how a field emerges through participants' intentional construction processes. People and organizations join fields in order to forward their own goals. Negotiations and contestations over meaning occur because the ability to define who and what belongs within the field can facilitate participants' access to resources.; Labels are important to the emergence of organizational fields. Before labels exist it is difficult for participants to talk about the field, organize around it, and attract resources to develop it. This dissertation argues that the adoption of labels by new and existing communities co-evolves with meaning and resources in the emergence of an organizational field. Employing 25 ethnographic observations, 77 interviews and 12,774 articles from five nanotechnology communities covering primarily the 21 year period from 1984 to 2005, I show how the adoption of the label "nanotechnology" to denote nanoscience co-evolved with the meaning of nanotechnology and the resources available in the field. The five communities were futurists, the government, service providers, companies, and scientists.; The nanotechnology field evolved through three phases: Mobilization, legitimation, and institutionalization. Various mechanisms facilitated the adoption of the nanotechnology label during the three phases. During the mobilization phase excitement, public discourse, and social gatherings played a key role in the adoption process. In the legitimation phase legitimacy, decoupling, and translation made the adoption possible. Finally, in the institutionalization phase renaming, labeling, and abandonment influenced the adoption process.; In this dissertation I show that as more communities adopted the nanotechnology label its meaning both broadened and changed from emphasizing nano-robotics to a focus on nanomaterials. Scientists and entrepreneurs were not the creators and first adopters of the nanotechnology label, instead futurists, the government and venture capitalists played pivotal roles in promoting the nanotechnology label by supplying the field with resources and infusing the nanotechnology label with meaning.; Theoretically this dissertation adds to our understanding of field emergence by reframing emergence as a categorization process.