Hayagreeva Rao

Understanding the bond of identification: An investigation of its correlates among art museum members.

Identification is defined as the “perceived oneness with or belongingness to an organization” of which the person is a member. The authors propose that customers, in their role as members, identify...

Institutional Change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an Identity Movement in French Gastronomy

A challenge facing cultural‐frame institutionalism is to explain how existing institutional logics and role identities are replaced by new logics and role identities. This article depicts identity movements that strive to expand individual autonomy as motors of institutional change. It proposes that the sociopolitical legitimacy of activists, extent of theorization of new roles, prior defections by peers to the new logic, and gains to prior defectors act as identity‐discrepant cues that induce actors to abandon traditional logics and role identities for new logics and role identities. A study of how the nouvelle cuisine movement in France led elite chefs to abandon classical cuisine during the period starting from 1970 and ending in 1997 provides wide‐ranging support for these arguments. Implications for research on institutional change, social movements, and social identity are outlined.

Sources of Durability and Change in Market Classifications: A Study of the Reconstitution of Product Categories in the American Mutual Fund Industry, 1944–1985

Categories are key elements of classification systems that segregate things into groups and impose coherence. Sociologists have studied how categories shape action in a wide variety of contexts but have spent much less time investigating the sources of category durability and change. We address this gap by investigating how existing product categories are reconstituted by field-level industry media. While standard accounts of industry media suggest that existing product categories will be edited on the basis of changes in the technical features of categories, we emphasize the political nature of markets and argue that powerful producers can preserve the existing structure of categories. We test these arguments in a study of the American mutual fund industry during the period from 1945 until 1985 and outline implications for research on institutional change and the political dynamics of market classification.

Store Wars: The Enactment and Repeal of Anti‐Chain‐Store Legislation in America1

Competition between organizational forms manifests itself in political contention over the law. The authors analyze the political strength and organization of the groups that supported and opposed state anti‐chain‐store laws. The enactment of these laws depended on intrastate political activity and the interstate diffusion of anti‐chain‐store legislation. The repeal process relied on suprastate activity, as nationally organized pro‐chain‐store forces shifted the arena of contention to the Supreme Court and forged national alliances with labor unions and agricultural cooperatives. In both enactment and repeal, the political resources and strategies of organziational forms interacted with existing institutions to determine the trajectory of institutional change.

Code Breaking: How Entrepreneurs Exploit Cultural Logics to Generate Institutional Change

Abstract If institutions are durable, how do they change from within and from without? We build on the emerging synthesis of social movement theory and institutional theory and articulate how institutional entrepreneurs from within and without deploy pre-existing cultural logics to push forward their institutional projects. We develop propositions, which show how the success of these framing activities is contingent on political opportunity, and illustrate them with a wide range of extreme cases.

Trouble in Store: Probes, Protests and Store Openings by Wal-Mart, 1998-2007

The authors consider how uncertainty over protest occurrence shapes the strategic interaction between companies and activists. Analyzing Wal‐Mart, the authors find support for their theory that companies respond to this uncertainty through a “test for protest” approach. In Wal‐Mart’s case, this consists of low‐cost probes in the form of new store proposals. They then withdraw if they face protests, especially when those protests signal future problems. Wal‐Mart is more likely to open stores that are particularly profitable, even if they are protested. This uncertainty‐based account stands in sharp contrast to full‐information models that characterize protests as rare miscalculations.

Vox Populi: Resource Partitioning, Organizational Proliferation, and the Cultural Impact of the Insurgent Microradio Movement1

Research on social movements has emphasized the origins of cultural movements, but has said little about how they impact popular culture through the creation of new organizations. The production of culture perspective asserts that market concentration in cultural industries inhibits diversity, but is silent about how social movements challenging corporate capitalism spur organizational birth. Organizational ecology describes how market concentration triggers anti–mass production movements, but has not examined whether the diversity of new organizations alters consumer behavior. The authors integrate these literatures to analyze how low‐power FM (LPFM) radio stations arose in response to the domination of radio by corporate chains and investigate the impact of LPFM stations on radio listening. Implications for the study of social movements, organizational ecology, and the production of culture are outlined.

Introduction: Social Movements in Organizations and Markets

ments have increasingly recognized that these two areas of research would both benefit from greater crossover. Organizations are the targets of, actors in, and sites for social movement activities. Social movements are often represented by formal organizations, while organizations resemble episodic “movements” rather than bounded actors. In an increasingly global economy and polity, organizations and movements are growing more transnational. And both movements and organizations are changing their strategies and routines in response to similar social and technological shifts. The same information and communication technologies that enable the management of global supply chains also allow global movement activities: on February 15, 2003, millions of participants marched in over 350 cities on six continents to protest the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq, marching under the common slogan “The World Says No to War.” As forms of coordinated social action, movements and organizations are ships riding the same waves.

Institutional activism in the early American automobile industry

Abstract A common proposition is that new industries gain constitutive legitimacy through claim making by institutional activists. Yet, neoinstitutional research seldom analyzes the effects of claim making on the formation of new organizations, and how the effect of claim making is moderated by other sources of constitutive legitimacy: advertising, legal recognition, and a policy regime favorable to business. I explore the relationship between claim making by activists and new organization building in a study of the early American automobile industry, when auto clubs organized reliability contests to validate the automobile. The results show that the visibility of reliability contests within the focal state increased foundings of car firms in the state, but that this effect diminished with advertising, legal recognition of the car, and the existence of a business friendly governor in the focal state. Taken together, these results demonstrate that claim making is crucial in the early phase of gaining legitimacy for new industries.

Category Reinterpretation and Defection: Modernism and Tradition in Italian Winemaking

When two groups of market actors differ in how to interpret a common label, each can make claims over the label. One categorical interpretation and the group that supports it risk disappearance if the rival interpretation gains ground. We argue that when members of the endangered category become partial defectors that span categories, their history presents challenges to the identity of nondefectors that will inhibit further change. Our empirical analysis of “traditionalism” and “modernism” in the making of Barolo and Barbaresco wines supports this argument.