From a conventional theoretical standpoint, the corporatization of the organic food movement is an example of co-optation. Co-optation theory conceptualizes the commercial marketplace as an ideological force that assimilates the symbols and practices of a counterculture into dominant norms. Our alternative argument is that co-optation can generate a countervailing market response that actively promotes the oppositional aspects of a counterculture attenuated by the process of commercial mainstreaming. To develop this theoretical argument, we analyze community-supported agriculture, which has emerged in response to the corporate cooptation of the organic food movement. We conclude by discussing how tacit political ideologies structure consumption communities.

Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines the evolution and competitive dynamics of markets composed of multiple practices, beliefs, and rule systems. The 30-year historical analysis of the U.S. yoga market illustrates the coexistence of spirituality, medical, fitness, and commercial logics. Using data gathered through archival sources, netnography, in-depth interviews, and participant observations, the authors link shifting emphases on institutional logics and their sustenance to institutional entrepreneurs’ accumulation and transmission of cultural capital, strategies to legitimize plural logics, distinct branding practices, and contestations among the pervading logics. The study offers a managerial framework for managing conflicting demands of logics, conveying brand legitimacy, and creating a coherent brand identity in plural logic markets; in addition, it develops a theoretical account of links between institutional logics, competitive dynamics, and market evolution.

Consumer researchers have primarily conceptualized cultural capital either as an endowed stock of resources that tend to reproduce socioeconomic hierarchies among consumer collectivities or as constellations of knowledge and skill that consumers acquire by making identity investments in a given consumption field. These studies, however, have given scant attention to the theoretical distinction between dominant and subordinate forms of cultural capital, with the latter affording comparatively lower conversion rates for economic, social, and symbolic capital. To redress this oversight, this article presents a multimethod investigation of middle-class men who are performing the emergent gender role of at-home fatherhood. Our analysis profiles and theoretically elaborates upon a set of capitalizing consumption practices through which at-home fathers seek to enhance the conversion rates of their acquisitions of domesticated (and subordinate) cultural capital and to build greater cultural legitimacy for their marginalized gender identity. REMAPPING THE STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CONSUMER DISTINCTIONS BASED ON CULTURAL CAPITAL While eschewing the rational actor assumptions of human capital theory (see Swartz 1997), Bourdieu (1986) argues that when consumers accumulate new forms of cultural capital, they are making a de facto investment in particular constellations of skills, knowledge, and cultivated aptitudes. The status value of these acquired stocks of cultural capital lies in their exchangeability, or conversion rate, for additional forms of cultural capital (e.g., credentials, knowledge, and skills), social capital (e.g., advantageous social connections), economic capital (e.g., occupational opportunities, etc.), and symbolic capital (social recognition, prestige, authority, respect, legitimacy, and other laudatory demarcations) that contribute to one's overall socioeconomic standing (Bourdieu 1986). Importantly, the conversion rate afforded by a given species of cultural capital is a function of the social fields in which it is deployed and the underlying relations of socioeconomic advantage or disadvantage that structure the distribution of cultural, social, and economic resources among social fields. From this standpoint, different forms of cultural capital can be remapped onto a dimension of dominant versus subordinate, which cuts across the generalized versus field-de

This article analyzes Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a form of ethical consumerism organized by a nexus of ideological discourses, romantic idealizations, and unconventional marketplace practices and relationships. Our analysis explicates the aspects of CSA that enable consumers to experience its pragmatic inconveniences and choice restrictions as enchanting moral virtues. We conclude by assessing the societal implications that follow from these localized marketplace relationships and their ideological distinctions to the modes of enchantment that are constituted in postmodern cathedrals of consumption.

Cultural hybridization indicates mixing, intermingling, and fusion of cultures that the globalized world enables and produces. Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines how hybrid cultural products strive for legitimacy in the context of yoga. We conceptualize American Yoga as a hybrid cultural practice that emerged as yoga was reconfigured through dialectical exchanges between India and the West and acquired new forms and meanings in the geographical and cultural sphere of the United States. The findings reveal a series of reterritorialization strategies through which market actors seek to advance moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy for American Yoga, accompanied by identity, ownership, and authenticity centered tensions. We illustrate reterritorialization as a legitimation process mediated by strategies of market actors and identify unique outcomes in legitimation of hybrid cultural products drawing from polar perspectives on hybridization.