Adaptive responses to crisis rely on effective cognitive frames: understanding what is going on amid unfolding crisis and what should be done to address it. Research has shown that failing to drop a routine cognitive frame exacerbates crises, while nimbly adopting a novel frame enhances resilience. This suggests that actors in crisis have an urgent dual mission: to simultaneously destroy and construct frames. Existing research offers little guidance on how actors can accomplish this in the midst of their struggles to survive threatening and disruptive circumstances. I address this shortcoming by drawing from a 22-month ethnography of a Detroit business incubator, analyzing how it gradually developed a novel diagnostic and prognostic frame of the city’s unfolding crisis. I propose and show that actors amid crisis construct a novel frame—while dismantling an old one—through a process of frame restructuration: the novel frame emerges from and co-evolves with unconventional actions that pragmatically address the exigencies of the crisis. Mutual constitution between pragmatic actions and the emergent frame can be critically propelled by the use of metaphor, which helps actors instantly reframe the context.
Social movements challenge incumbents and drive institutional change by introducing market alternatives—new products and organizational forms that embody an alternative institutional logic. Research has shown that in response to market alternatives, incumbents resist through heterogeneous behaviors: incumbents maintain their commitment to the dominant logic, effectively marginalizing challengers, while also ostensibly endorsing the alternative logic and often successfully coopting challengers. Although incumbents’ strategic responses to pioneering market alternatives are well documented, we do not know how their heterogeneous behaviors affect new waves of challenger mobilization and how these mobilizations may differently address the hazards of cooptation and marginalization. We investigate the rise of the B Corp (Certified B Corporation) movement against the backdrop of both ongoing shareholder supremacy and rising corporate social responsibility (CSR) among incumbent corporations. Our multi-method, multi-stage investigation reveals that heterogeneous incumbent behaviors encourage new waves of challenger mobilization by seeding divergent mobilizing frames. This variety can lead to a paradoxical form of mobilization in which challengers dynamically balance the tension between their movements’ focus on expansion and purity, rather than prioritizing one over the other. The B Corp movement demonstrates how achieving this balance may help challengers avoid cooptation or marginalization, sustain their challenge against incumbents, and achieve more-transformative change. For incumbents, our findings show that both resistance to and the ostensible embrace of alternative logics may stave off immediate challenges but can also invigorate future challenges that pose substantive threats to the dominant logic.
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