This study examines how proponents and opponents of an emergent market category vie to shape the development of regulatory labels of new products. While an extensive amount of organizational research has examined how market category labels are constructed and adopted, less attention has been paid to processes of regulatory labelling. This is surprising, as studies have acknowledged that market and regulatory labels serve different purposes and are governed by different sets of rules and objectives. Whereas market labels are designed to influence consumer choice and signal competitive positioning, regulatory labels are designed to ensure transparency, consumer safety, and product compliance. In this study, we explore the process by which a regulatory label was negotiated in the nascent market category of cell-cultivated meat (i.e., meat produced by cultivating animal cells in bioreactors). Drawing on archival documents, interviews, and ethnographic observations, we unpack the different strategies employed by proponents and opponents—showing how these strategies influenced regulatory labels and, thus, how the product was classified under the law and the regulatory agencies responsible. Building on our findings, we theorize how regulators manage competing interests by striking a balance in linguistic distancing, conceptualized as the optimal association and dissociation from an existing category that facilitates category emergence, while preserving the stability of existing institutional frameworks. The study contributes to research on strategic categorization and the dynamics of creating and using labels to shape category emergence.
