Market categories have attracted considerable interest over the last few years. However, as the literature has mostly focused on the disciplining role of existing categories, it faces difficulty to explain the emergence and transformation of market categories. Accordingly, this article focuses on the negotiation of meaning and status of an emerging market category in the camera industry: mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras (MILC). MILC emerged in 2008, as an hybrid between the two institutionalized categories in the camera market: compact cameras (typically cheap, compact, and easy to use) and reflex cameras (typically more expensive, better quality, bigger, and meant for expert users). Despite considerable initial interest of audiences for the emergent category, and considerable investment in R&D and marketing from different manufacturers, the category lags behinds industry expectations, and remains weakly institutionalized. To analyse the difficulty to institutionalize the new market category, we link the concepts of status, framing, and category currency, and introduce the notion of category schizophrenia. We show that emerging market categories constitute arenas of competition, where manufacturers try to frame the meaning and status of the category according to their own status and interests in the field. In the absence of institutional forces, this process leads to increasing dissonance and heterogeneity within the category. In the case of the MILC category, this process leads to a situation that we call category schizophrenia, where audiences face increasing difficulties to make sense of the frontiers, meaning and identity of the category. We make different contributions to the literature. First, by exploring how actors struggle to frame the status of emerging categories, we unveil the political issues inherent in the emergence of new market categories. Secondly, we discuss the generality of the notion of category schizophrenia and its link to category emergence and dissolution. Last, we discuss the implications of this perspective for both innovation management and research on market categories.
