Not Just Small Potatoes: Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Moralizing of Markets

Abstract

While there is a growing literature on moral markets that aim to create social value through market exchange, much of it has focused on how producer activism is able to legitimate new, institutionally complex, organizational and economic forms that are inscribed with competing market and social/community logics. Much less attention has been directed towards understanding how moral markets are scaled by the entry of large, established organizations. While the scaling of moral markets entails the risk of conservative goal transformation, we still know relatively little about how moral values become embedded in markets, providing an ongoing catalyst for social value creation. Based on a five-year ethnographic study, we show how cultural entrepreneurship associated with the creation of a cross-sector partnership, legitimated local food procurement by large, established organizations, enabling the scaling of the overall market. We argue that a key aspect of their success had to do with bridging the institutional void segregating local and industrial food logics. Based on our study, we highlight how this institutional void bridging was facilitated by cultural entrepreneurship that initially focused on communications that decoupled the values and practices associated with the local food logic, and subsequently, reinfused locavore values by valorizing stories and activities that recoupled those values to food procurement practices after the institutional void was diminished. We discuss the implications of our study for research on moral markets and cultural entrepreneurship.