Category boundaries are definitional, so relabeling lets firms shift strategy without abandoning it

Evidence

The [change in strategy] would have been marginal. It would still have been the heavier end [of the truck market]. Just because some people say that heavy trucks are those that weigh more than 16 tons, you cannot say that over 12 tons is a light truck. Of course [you can say that they are heavy, too.] It’s a matter of definition. Some countries have a threshold at 14 tons and some at 15. It would not have been a problem, but it never became an urgent issue. Chief Human Resource Officer (Interview 2003) Scania was thus willing to make compromises regarding its modular philosophy and the concentration on the heavy segment if the firm would have been forced by the market. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 514

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the load-bearing role of category definitions: ‘heavy’ is a threshold choice, not a natural fact.
• SHARE: A truck-industry insider casually revealing that a headline strategy pivot was really a relabeling — niche enough for someone who works on category definitions or strategy.