Categories provide a rich register of cultural elements that entrepreneurial actors mobilize to make their endeavors amenable to interested audiences, such as resource providers. But why are some cultural elements routinely invoked, while others emerge or fall out of use? To theorize the codification and transformation of cultural registers, i.e., the set of cultural elements associated with a given product category, we map how entrepreneurial claims evolved on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Using a computer-assisted qualitative approach, we analyzed the content of 65,871 crowdfunding campaigns launched across six product categories over 11 years. From our analysis, we build a process model explaining when and how entrepreneurial actors collectively enrich and prune their cultural registers, codifying some elements as central to a category while casting others as more peripheral. Extending recent insights, which have begun to challenge the dominant two-step model of category formation, we seek to explain how collective yet uncoordinated action may reinforce or reformulate the shared understanding of a given category.
