The adoption of a vegan diet might have public, health, and environmental benefits; however, still little is known about veganism as the majority of studies on dietary lifestyles have focused on vegetarianism. Hence, in order to address this gap, the present study adopted a sequential and mixed (qualitative; quantitative) research approach based on laddering interviews (n = 20) and a survey (n = 400) to validate the motives for adopting a vegan diet. The results identified seven motives: economic, ethical, health‐related, hedonic, animal empathy, respect for animal rights, and personal accountability. Three motives in particular—(i.e., animal empathy, accountability, and animal rights) appear to be the key determinants of consumer’s self‐identification as vegan‐oriented individuals. The study found five attributes (price, nutritious, freshness; tasty, eco/animal friendly ingredients) of vegan products associated with the afore‐mentioned motives. Food marketers and policy makers could highlight such attributes to encourage the adoption of a vegan diet.

The academic literature on whether consumers respond positively toward corporate social responsibility (hereafter CSR) initiatives in the luxury sector is limited and contradictory. Our research contributes to this on‐going debate by exploring the role of CSR moral foundations. By differentiating individualizing moral foundations (e.g., justice) from binding moral foundations (e.g., loyalty), our three experiments jointly suggest consumers respond more positive toward CSR guided by binding (vs. individualizing) foundations. Our results further suggest perceptions of intrinsic CSR motives mediate the impact of CSR moral foundations on consumer attitude. However, this mediation is moderated by the nature of tourism destination, more evident in a nature‐based (vs. urban) destination. Taken together, our research suggests the luxury sector needs to focus on binding foundations rather than individualizing foundations to create a win‐win situation.

Research on market dynamics shows that markets (trans)form through the institutional work of a wide range of actors. This literature, however, focuses on resourceful and/or powerful actors who can freely and openly shape the market. Via an inductive analysis of the Iranian female fashion clothing market, we examine the institutional work undertaken by actors who have limited resources and are subject to power structures that constrain their institutional work. We find that consumers, designers, retailers, and social activists engage in ambidextrous practices, secure networks, and stealthy defiance to navigate or moderate their institutional restrictions. Such work contributes to the relaxation of some state regulations and the coexistence of parallel taste structures. The study draws attention to mundane, subtle, and less visible and organized institutional work and extends knowledge on marketplace resistance by showing that everyday acts of resistance can function as unintentional institutional work that contributes to market dynamics.

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Through a nine-month ethnography in an advertising agency in Iran, a deeply conservative society, we explore the microprocesses through which actors search for and exploit areas of institutional plasticity toward incremental change. Given the infeasibility of more significant change in a highly institutionalized arrangement, actors in these settings are likely to seek out institutions characterized by the highest degree of plasticity. Yet, extant institutional research has not yet addressed the question of how they may go about doing so, which is what we seek to do in this paper. By studying how celebrity endorsement became more normative in the field of advertising despite initial resistance from Iranian government regulators, we make four contributions to institutional literature. First, we demonstrate how institutional plasticity can serve as an antecedent to incremental institutional change in highly institutionalized contexts. Second, we trace the source of institutional plasticity to a misalignment between institutional pillars. Third, we identify the tactics and strategies that challengers use in the process of sensing institutional plasticity and stretching institutional boundaries. Finally, we shed light on the use of material and discursive resources across different stages of negotiations over incremental movements in the boundaries of normativity within a highly institutionalized setting.