Institutional entrepreneurs and legitimation strategies: The case of personal hygiene in France from 1880 to 1980

Abstract

This article investigates representations of personal hygiene in France between 1880 and 1980. We led a historical method-based inquiry to understand the legitimation process surrounding a redefinition of personal hygiene championed by different sets of institutional entrepreneurs (business, science community, school, the press and so on). We find that each set employs several strategies: connecting personal hygiene to public decency, introducing new personal hygiene tools to equip consumers, and defining legitimate and illegitimate hygiene practices. We sift through these strategies to tease out the concept of distributed agency by contrasting the roles and interventional spaces co-opted by the different sets of institutional entrepreneurs.