Social evaluations play a crucial role in facilitating economic exchanges, business relationships and influencing the structure of markets and industries. This paper explores how legitimacy, status, reputation, and stigma interact to shape firms' competitive positions and con-tribute to the overall structuring of an industry. We illustrate the interplay of these social evaluation constructs through a historical case study of the global paper machinery industry from 1950 to 2000. Our analysis focuses on two competing industry leaders, Valmet and Beloit, which occupied distinctly different positions both in the early 1950s and at the turn of the millennium, and whose contrasting trajectories help illustrate the processes that contribute to either improving or eroding a firm's competitive standing.
