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PART I
STYLISTIC PRODUCTION
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STYLE TYPOLOGIES AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Giovanni Formilan
ABSTRACT
The concept of style is gaining momentum in organizational research. Focussing on its implications for strategy, this paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework to make the notion of style operational and applicable to both research and practice. Style is defined here as a combinatorial, socially situated and semiotic device that can be organized into typologies – recurrent combinations of stylistic dimensions exerting a normative and semiotic function within and across contexts. The empirical analysis, situated in the field of electronic music, considers the music genres and the colour dimension of artists' appearance as components of their style. Results show how coherent style typologies normatively dominate the field and how non-conformist but coherent typologies correspond to superior creative performance. Operating as unifying device, style can transform varied and potentially confounding traits into distinctiveness and shed light on competitive market dynamics that cannot be fully explained via other theoretical constructs.
Keywords Style typologies; strategy; colour theory; creative industries; visual analysis; competitive advantage
STYLE TYPOLOGIES AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Giovanni Formilan
There's pictures of Miles in his apartment […], and you see his closet is filled with just the most fantastic leathers and suedes and silks and colors. And glasses and scarves and animal prints and… I mean, just the whole thing is very funky. And you know his original look was Brooks Brothers. When he was playing straight ahead jazz, he was always dressed in a very conservative way. He had an impeccable sense of style. Then, as the ‘70s rolled in, he was with his wife, Betty Davis […]. She kinda pushed him in that direction, and he became the funky Miles that we know. (Lenny Kravitz on Miles Davis; Houghton, 2018)
INTRODUCTION
In 2001, the Icelandic singer Björk appeared on the red carpet of the 73rd Academy Awards wearing a swan-shaped dress. With the swan's head dangling from one side of her neck, Björk's outfit raised a passionate debate among journalists and fashion designers. Considering her artistic persona, however, Björk's look choice did not raise much surprise. ‘The infamous swan dress… was as strange as the Icelandic singer herself’ (Helwig, Galuppo, & Godley, 2015). In public perception, the musical uniqueness of Björk was perfectly consistent with her peculiar appearance.
Björk's outfit decision is not an isolated incident. Artists and creative producers convey their creative voice not only through the content of their activity (design products, music, painting) but also via the form of their action (aesthetic choices, behaviours and gestures). Often, as the opening quote on Miles Davis alludes to, decisions regarding an artist's external appearance reflect personality traits and evolve as one's artistic identity develops in new and different directions.
The stories of Björk and Miles Davis are examples of how creative personalities are constructed and communicated through diverse combinations of content and form. Besides reflecting a producer's identity, such combinations can also represent a source of competitive advantage that enables differentiation, distinctiveness and strategic positioning. Whereas ‘straight ahead jazz’ prompted Miles Davis to adopt a conservative appearance, his 1970's ‘funky’ look was more effective in locating his artistic persona within a more innovative jazz wave.
Despite their centrality in practice, however, little research has systematically investigated how producers' content and form dimensions are related and which effects their diverse combinations exert on market performance. This acknowledgement prompts two practical questions. First, how can different but related dimensions of a producer's creative identity be treated holistically? Second, how is it possible to operationalize such combinations to produce evidence of their strategic relevance?
To shed preliminary light on these questions, I draw on the notion of style (Goodman, 1975, 1978; Meyer, 1989; Ross, 2003; Shapiro, 1994; Simmel, 1957, 1991) to holistically account for different dimensions of a producer's creative identity. Ubiquitous in organization studies (e.g., Covin & Slevin, 1988; Elsbach, 2009; Sgourev & Althuizen, 2014; Witkin, 1990), the notion of style has recently gained momentum as a concept holding promising implications for organizational research (Godart, 2018). Its contribution to strategy, however, remains largely unexplored in practice.
Joining this recent interest, I focus in this paper on the strategic implications of style, offering a framework to operationalize the concept in strategic terms, and presenting conceptual and methodological tools to grasp evidence of its relevance. I do this in three steps.
First, I introduce a definition of style organized around three primary elements. I consider style as a combination of aesthetically perceptible elements, about both the content and the form of an entity. Such a combination is socially situated in space and time and performs a semiotic function with respect to the entity and its external observers.
Second, moving from this definition, I illustrate a typological approach to style. Informed by the notion of organizational typologies (Chandler, 1962; Mintzberg, 1979), I define style typologies as recurrent arrangements of differently organized stylistic elements. Style typologies, intervening as normative, semiotic and classificatory devices within a focal context (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Glynn & Navis, 2013), can be fruitfully used to outline industry-level dynamics of distinctiveness and competition.
Finally, I empirically explore style and style typologies in electronic music (Gilbert & Pearson, 1999; Reynolds, 1998; Thornton, 1996). Drawing on colour theory (Elliot & Maier, 2007; Rosch, 1973) and categorization research (Durand & Paolella, 2013; Glynn & Navis, 2013; Hsu & Hannan, 2005), I operationalize style typologies as coherent and incoherent combinations of musical eclecticism (Lena & Peterson, 2008) and visual garishness (Elliot & Maier, 2007) and proceed to test their normative and semiotic function.
Using an innovative methodology to manipulate visual material, I situate the analysis in an authoritative Top-100 industry ranking. I initially show that coherent-style typologies dominantly characterize the identities of top-performing artists in electronic music. Like in the case of organizational typologies (Greenwood & Hinings, 1988; Hannan, Pólos, & Carroll, 2007), coherent-style typologies perform better in the market and therefore tend to be adopted isomorphically by field's actors (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Nelson & Winter, 1982).
I then discuss how style can be strategically manipulated by creative innovators to synthesize eclecticism within a consistent and unified message. Creative producers often span and experiment with multiple genres (Formilan & Stark, 2020; Lampel, Lant, & Shamsie, 2000), and, in doing this, they risk to convey ambiguous identities, confound their audiences and undermine their market performance (Hsu, 2006). In force of its combinatorial nature, style can, however, work as a unifying semiotic device, turning non-conformist but coherent identities int...
