Category dynamics and cluster spanning during the emergence of the Lebanese newspaper industry (1851–1879)

Recently, researchers have started to pay more attention to a usually ignored topic: audience perceptions. Legitimacy, for example, is no longer modeled as the number of organizations in a population. It is now thought to be dependent on how audience members perceive these organizations. This paper will study how the newspaper industry in Lebanon emerged. The paper studies the period 1851–1879, building on the theoretic formulation of Hannan et al. (2007). The concept of cluster formation will also be introduced in order to help answer the question of whether unified identity projection is a necessary condition for successful legitimation and emergence. So far, research has produced diverging results as to the necessary conditions for successful legitimation. Cluster Analysis is used to show that in the case of the Lebanese newspaper industry, successful emergence was attained without the need to project a unified identity. In fact, the analysis clearly shows that there were two separate groups of clusters that had emerged by the end of the period. The nature of these two clusters will be investigated by looking at the category spanning activities of the newspapers that were members of the clusters.