Ryann Noe (Harvard Business School)

Moral Incoherence During Category Emergence: The Contentious Case of Connected Toys

Through a longitudinal study of the emergence of connected toys – physical toys that interact with digital devices – I build theory about moral incoherence: when competing beliefs about the moral worth of a category persist over time. During their emergence, connected toys were criticized by child-development experts and many parents for threatening children’s safety and development, and for feeding children’s “digital addiction.” Nevertheless, toymakers and industry analysts continued to celebrate the category, and connected toys saw market growth. My analysis reveals two sub-stages of moral incoherence – polarization and dissonance – in which stakeholders first contest and then conditionalize a category’s moral worth. In contrast to existing theory, I find that this contestation need not be resolved for a category to emerge and grow. Instead, by analyzing both rhetoric and material design, I show that producers can progressively match the spectrum of beliefs with a spectrum of (counter)offerings. Stakeholders thus seek settlement not through shared understanding, but through a segmented landscape where moral alternatives coexist side-by-side.