This book traces the struggle to reconcile ideas and practices related to market growth, on the one hand, and sociocultural change, on the other, that exists within the U.S. organic foods sector. Using a multi-level, qualitative approach, it examines how sector members engage with these ideas and practices during their day-to-day activities, as well as during periods of institution building and sector-level change. It uses interviews conducted by the author with sixty organic foods businesspeople, regulators, and advocates, as well as a wide range of archival sources, to describe how sector me ... More

This book traces the struggle to reconcile ideas and practices related to market growth, on the one hand, and sociocultural change, on the other, that exists within the U.S. organic foods sector. Using a multi-level, qualitative approach, it examines how sector members engage with these ideas and practices during their day-to-day activities, as well as during periods of institution building and sector-level change. It uses interviews conducted by the author with sixty organic foods businesspeople, regulators, and advocates, as well as a wide range of archival sources, to describe how sector members have promoted intrasectoral conflict by emphasizing differences between these understandings and how they strive for compromise by highlighting points of convergence. Substantively, this text explains how the compromises that existed during the organic sector’s early years dissolved into conflicts related to federal organic foods regulations, and it also documents the interrelated contemporary strategies of newly arrived organic foods businesspeople, activist critics of market growth, and countercultural co-op store leaders. At a theoretical level, the book makes use of sociological and organizational scholarship about institutional logics to construct an analytic frame for research about fields that are divided between conflicting understandings of purpose and different imagined future trajectories. It also pushes the institutional logics approach further by explaining how the social mechanisms of cultural framing and organizational/institutional work mediate between contradictory logics and processes of conflict and compromise.