This study illuminates how new markets emerge and how social movements can effect cultural change through market creation. We suggest that social movements can fuel solutions to three challenges in creating new market segments: entrepreneurial production, the creation of collective producer identities, and the establishment of regular exchange between producers and consumers. We use qualitative data on the grassroots coalition movement that has spurred a market for grass-fed meat and dairy products in the United States since the early 1990s. Our analysis shows that the movement's participants mobilized broad cultural codes and that these codes motivated producers to enter and persist in a nascent market, shaped their choices about production and exchange technologies, enabled a collective identity, and formed the basis of the products' exchange value.•

By developing the concept of “gastronationalism,” this article challenges conceptions of the homogenizing forces of globalism. I analyze (1) the ways in which food production, distribution, and consumption can demarcate and sustain the emotive power of national attachment and (2) how nationalist sentiments, in turn, can shape the production and marketing of food. The multi-methodological analyses reveal how the construct of gastronationalism can help us better understand pan-national tensions in symbolic boundary politics—politics that protect certain foods and industries as representative of national cultural traditions. I first analyze the macro-level dimensions of market protections by examining the European Union’s program for origin-designation labels that delineates particular foods as nationally owned. The micro-level, empirical case—the politics surrounding foie gras in France—demonstrates how gastronationalism functions as a protectionist mechanism within lived experience. Foie gras is an especially relevant case because other parties within the pan-national system consider it morally objectionable. Contemporary food politics, beyond the insights it affords into symbolic boundary politics, speaks to several arenas of sociological interest, including markets, identity politics, authenticity and culture, and the complexities of globalization.

Movements associated with lifestyle and consumption politics have gained increasing visibility in society and in sociological research, but scholars’ methodological insights for studying these issues have lagged behind. How might the lifestyles and consumption practices of researchers themselves shape data collection, and how might these movements affect researchers? The authors offer a collaborative, reflexive analysis of their experiences conducting fieldwork on three different consumption movements centered on food production. Building on feminist and symbolic interactionist methodological literature, they show how their own “consumption identities” affected their data collection, analyses, and written work. The authors also discuss how conducting research on consumption and lifestyle movements may also affect researchers’ own identities and practices. They conclude by discussing how their process of “collaborative reflexivity” brings new insight into feminist methodological concerns for reflexivity.

Research in organizational theory suggests that category-spanning organizations typically suffer penalties in evaluations, as consumers downgrade producers they see as violating authenticity norms. We challenge this view by linking two heretofore separate insights: first, that categorical boundaries erode as categories become taken-for-granted and, second, that consumers in a given category tend to become more heterogeneous as their numbers increase. We argue that newer consumers employ diverse evaluative schemata and rely less on established conceptions of authenticity than do veterans, leading to more generous evaluations as the ranks of consumers grow. Using the canonical case of craft beer, we test the effect of audience growth on consumer evaluations, particularly when producers violate categorical authenticity norms. Our analysis of an original dataset of more than 45,000 ratings of craft beers from a popular online forum finds both that overall beer ratings increase and that penalties to authenticity norm violations attenuate as the number of new reviewers participating in the evaluative process rises. These results refine our understanding of shifting demands for categorical purity, conceptions of authenticity, and consumer evaluations as functions of market growth.

This article examines perceptions of health risk when some individuals within a shared space are in heightened danger but anyone, including unaffected others, can be a vector of risk. Using the case of peanut allergy and drawing on qualitative content analysis of the public comments submitted in response to an unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to prohibit peanuts on airplanes, we analyze contention over the boundaries of responsibility for mitigating exposure to risk. We find three key dimensions of proximity to risk (material, social, and situational) characterizing ardent claims both for and against policy enactment. These proximity concerns underlay commenters’ sensemaking about fear, trust, rights, moral obligations, and liberty in the act of sharing space with others, while allowing them to stake positions on what we call “responsible sociality”—an ethic of discernible empathy for proximate others and of consideration for public benefit in social and communal settings. We conclude by discussing the insights our case affords several other areas of scholarship attentive to the intractable yet timely question of “for whom do we care?”