Cutting the Apron Strings: Protégé Strategic Distinctiveness in Reference to a Mentor in Creative Industries | Research Seminar with Daphne Demetry

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Abstract: Research has established that organizations benefit from being “optimally distinct,” i.e., both like and sufficiently different from competitors. We know less however about how producers think about and enact their strategic positioning choices. We explore these questions through a qualitative study of chef-owners who started their own restaurants after training with well-known mentors. We produce an inductive account of chefs’ strategic positioning choices as they relate to their former mentors, finding two types of strategic identities—legacy and divergent—which are shaped by occupational pressures and interpersonal mentoring relationships. This research generates insights into the microprocesses associated with optimal distinctiveness, i.e., the ways in which producers themselves think about navigating pressures involving similarity and difference and the constraints they face in their strategic choices.

Daphne Demetry is an assistant professor of Strategy & Organization in the Desautels Faculty of Management. She joined the faculty in 2017 after a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Centre for Corporate Reputation at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University. As an organizational theorist and economic sociologist, Daphne uses primarily ethnographic and qualitative methods to explore questions of how entrepreneurs and organizations create and negotiate meaning as they interact with their audiences. She has explored these questions predominately in the craft and creative fields and especially the culinary industry, e.g., underground and pop-up restaurants, gourmet food trucks, and fine dining establishments.