What's in a name? Giving form and meaning to a new culinary category

This study examines how a new category gains form and meaning in the presence of multiple logics, competing labels, and multiple modes of sensegiving and sensemaking. We analyze the work of four emblematic chefs associated with the emerging category of ‘molecular gastronomy’ from 1995 to 2015: Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, and Massimo Bottura. We show that category formation is a circular and iterative process, consisting of...