This article examines how social movements contribute to institutional change and the creation of new industries. We build on current efforts to bridge institutional and social movement perspectives in sociology and develop the concept of field frame to study how industries are shaped by social structures of meanings and resources that underpin and stabilize practices and social organization. Drawing on the case of how non-profit recyclers and the recycling social movement enabled the rise of a for-profit recycling industry, we show that movements can help to transform extant socioeconomic practices and enable new kinds of industry development by engaging in efforts that lead to the deinstitutionalization of field frames. 3 SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, FIELD FRAMES AND INDUSTRY EMERGENCE:A CULTURAL-POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON U.S. RECYCLING "We have to realize that there is a certain ironic, wry success in that nonprofits all over the country have test-piloted it [recycling] so successfully that big capital has come in and taken over" (quoted in Weinberg, Pellow & Schnaiberg, 2000: 95).How do marginal practices become the foundation for the emergence of new economic institutions such as industries? While the study of how industries and markets emerge has received little attention in economics (Granovetter & Swedberg, 2001), sociologists have directed increasing attention to such questions over the past couple of decades (e.g. Hollingsworth & Boyer, 1997;Fligstein, 2001;White, 2002). Sociological approaches to industry emergence are varied, but have highlighted the importance of studying how economic institutions are embedded in wider fields of interaction that include professional and trade associations, governmental agencies, and other nonprofit and for-profit actors (e.g. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;Campbell, Hollingsworth & Lindberg, 1991;Schneiberg, 1999). Extant constructionist accounts, rooted in organizational and economic sociology, focus on tracking the processes and mechanisms by which economic activities and practices take shape as an industry as a result of the development of a supporting organizational infrastructure, the creation of symbolic boundaries that define appropriate industry activities, and the attainment of legitimacy (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994;Granovetter & McGuire, 1998;Ventresca & Porac, forthcoming). However, these accounts tend to neglect how the fate of industries is bound up in broader field-level political struggles over meanings and resources (Zelizer, 1979;Stryker, 1994;Schneiberg and Bartley, 2001;Lounsbury and Ventresca, 2002). We develop the case of the rise of the recycling industry in the U.S. solid waste field to contribute to the development of a broader and more dynamic approach to socioeconomics that takes the study of cultural processes seriously.We build on recent efforts to bridge ideas in institutional analysis and social movement theory in sociology (e.g. Clemens, 1997;Rao, 1998;Strang & Soule, 1998), and introduce the 4 concept of "field frame" to focus attention on how cultura...
The rise and fall of organizational effectiveness, an “umbrella construct” once at the forefront of organizational theory, is traced through four life-cycle stages: emerging excitement, the validity challenge, “tidying up with typologies,” and construct collapse. Although the study of effectiveness has declined, research on its component elements continues to thrive. Using the effectiveness story as an exemplar, we develop a more general model of this process for all umbrella constructs, defined here as broad concepts used to encompass and account for a diverse set of phenomena. This life-cycle model—driven largely by a dialectic between researchers with a broad perspective (“umbrella advocates”) and those with a narrower one (“validity police”)—leaves open the possibility that some umbrella constructs may ultimately be made coherent or remain permanently controversial rather than collapse, as effectiveness has done. We propose that umbrella constructs will arise most frequently in academic fields without a theoretical consensus, will inevitably have their validity seriously challenged, will have a shorter life than their constituent elements, and will be more vulnerable to validity challenges when they lack support from practitioners. This model's implications for the future direction of such current umbrella constructs as organizational learning, culture, strategy, and performance are also explored and elaborated. Ironically, some evidence suggests that studies around the construct of organizational “performance” have arisen to replace the nearly identical, but fallen umbrella construct of organizational effectiveness.
While the literature on framing has importantly expanded our understanding of frame creation and contests from an interpretive point of view, previous studies have largely neglected the structural contexts in which framing activities occur. In this study, we propose extending the framing approach by incorporating insights from the literature on sensemaking to examine how and when opportunities for meaning creation open up and how this affects subsequent discursive processes. Connecting framing and sensemaking better enables us to examine how structural factors prompt and bound discursive processes, affecting when and where frame contests emerge. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by examining changes in the discourse of globalization. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses of newspaper articles and corporate press releases, we trace the emergence of globalization discourse, its diffusion, and the increasing contention that surrounds it. Our findings show how and where globalization discourse emerged in response to greater U.S. involvement with the international economy, and how later frame contests over the meaning of globalization have depended on the interests of the actors involved.
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