EXPRESS: High on Coopetition? How Collective Categories Cognitively Order Cooperation and Competition

Some organizational collectives are composed of firms that cooperate to advance collective goals while competing to pursue their own interests. Yet less is known about how such collectives navigate cooperation and competition across the practices through which collective coopetition is enacted. We argue that collective coopetition is organized through members’ categorization of practices. We examine this process during the early emergence of the U.S. recreational cannabis industry (2012–2017), where firms faced simultaneous pressures to support legalization and industry development while pursuing firm-level growth. Using Cultural Consensus Modeling, we examine how industry participants categorized 32 practices as cooperative and/or competitive and how these categorizations were associated with practice prevalence. Our findings show that collective categories enable, clarify, and constrain practice prevalence. Highly prevalent practices included professionalizing forms of competition and collective-oriented practices related to education, standards, and industry participation. Our study shows how collective categories cognitively order cooperation and competition across diverse practices.