Social movements, field frames and industry emergence: a cultural-political perspective on US recycling

Abstract

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...

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