In this paper, we examine the dual role that social movement organizations can play in altering organizational landscapes by undermining existing organizations and creating opportunities for the growth of new types of organizations. Empirically, we investigate the impact of a variety of tactics employed by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the leading organizational representative of the American temperance movement, on two sets of organizations: breweries and soft drink producers. By delegitimating alcohol consumption, altering attitudes and beliefs about drinking, and promoting temperance legislation, the WCTU contributed to brewery failures. These social changes, in turn, created opportunities for entrepreneurs to found organizations producing new kinds of beverages by creating demand for alternative beverages, providing rationales for entrepreneurial action, and increasing the availability of necessary resources.

Although existing research has demonstrated the importance of attaining legitimacy for new market categories, few scholars have considered the trade-offs associated with such actions. Using the U.S. organic food product category as a context, we explore how one standards-based certification organization—the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF)—sought to balance efforts to legitimate a nascent market category with retaining a shared, distinctive identity among its members. Our findings suggest that legitimacy-seeking behaviors undertaken by the standards organization diluted the initial collective identity and founding ethos of its membership. However, by shifting the meaning of “organic” from the producer to the product, CCOF was able to strengthen the categorical boundary, thereby enhancing its legitimacy. By showing how the organization managed the associated trade-offs, this study highlights the double-edged nature of legitimacy and offers important implications for the literatures on legitimacy and new market category formation. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1126 .

Many entrepreneurs in developing economies face unstable environments due to violence and civil unrest. Yet, we know very little about how environments characterized by high levels of political and civil violence affect new venture processes and survival. Moreover, it is unclear whether standard theories about organizational strategy, such as planning, hold true in such environments. We explore these issues using a sample of 730 new ventures in Colombia from 1997 to 2001. We find that political and civil violence decreases firm survival, increases the benefits of incremental (operational) planning, and decreases the benefits of comprehensive (strategic) planning.

Little is known about the factors that influence regulatory-agency decision making. We posit that regulatory agencies are influenced by the firms they regulate, but not exclusively via dyadic exchanges as is traditionally argued in the regulatory capture and business-government literatures. Instead, regulatory decisions are indirectly shaped via third-party actors who shield agencies from legitimacy threats. Focusing empirically on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's approval of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), we find that product assessments by powerful stakeholders and peer agencies influence product approval and that their effects vary under different threats. We also discuss the implications of these findings for businessgovernment relations, nonmarket strategy, and organization theory.