On solid grounds: Dynamic emplacement and category construction in US specialty coffee, 1974–2016

Understanding how the construction of a market category occurs is contingent upon a consideration of where it occurs. Yet extant research mostly depicts place as the backdrop against which market actors cognitively formulate claims about the meaning of a category. Drawing on an inductive historical study of over four decades of the US specialty coffee category, I induce an empirically grounded model of category construction through dynamic emplacement: actors’ ongoing efforts to ground category meanings in particular places and places’ ongoing heightening of the category’s credibility. This model reorients research away from an exclusive focus on socio-cognitive explanations that highlight claim-making and claim-evaluation as the drivers of category construction and, instead, recognizes that categories are also experienced and transformed materially. Dynamic emplacement unfolds as (1) actors anchor category meanings, shift material forms, and transpose the category to new meaning systems, and (2) places, as bundles of location, material forms, and meanings, become truth-spots—sites in which experiences of the category render “what ought to be” and, thus, what is central to the category. The study suggests that dynamic emplacement helps to address construction challenges, enabling the category to develop without losing its bearings.