Sustainable Food Consumption Practices: How Marketing can Contribute to Institutional Change: An Abstract

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, health and environmental issues have led to the reshaping of a more sustainable or resilient agriculture and to increased sales of organic and local products. However, organic food accounts for only $4 billion in Canada, barely 3% of total annual food consumption, and direct-to-consumer markets represent only 3% of Quebecers’ food consumption (Mundler and Laughrea 2015). As sustainable consumption patterns became more prevalent, the food retail landscape had to adapt and has dramatically changed. Academic literature in management, and to a lesser degree in marketing, used to oppose or to study separately the legitimation process of different types of food retailing (Beylier et al. 2011; Lanciano 2018; Zaidi-Chtourou and Vernier 2017). This paper proposes a more integrative understanding of the dynamics of change in the food’s organizational field. Sociological neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) has focused on the dynamics of institutional change and is able to explain both continuity and change in social practices (Maguire and Hardy 2009). Moreover, it provides a broader perspective on the analysis than Consumer Culture Theory (Arnould and Thompson 2005), which remains focused on the company-consumer dyad. Our ethnographic study allows us to establish a primary diagnosis of the food’s organizational field in Quebec. Sustainable food is an emergent field in transition between theorization and diffusion stages (Maguire et al. 2004): if the actors share the same values and the same sense of reality, rules of interaction are still under construction on a macro level (Bitektine and Haack 2015). Results highlight the institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006) of individual actors in order to influence the three pillars of institutions that structure the organizational field (Scott 1995). However, data analysis reveals three major issues which affect respectively each of the three pillars: the lack of pragmatic legitimacy (Bitekhtine 2011), the need for collective standards and the absence of political representation. These issues impede the cognitive legitimation process (Suchman 1995) and stop the institutional change (Greenwood et al. 2002). Such diagnosis allows marketing practitioners to identify what needs to be done in order to contribute to institutional change. As Chaney and Ben Slimane (2014) argued, marketing can contribute to influence the legitimation process, which implies integrating or adapting the value proposition of the organization into shared meaning patterns. For example, we suggest the “anchoring” market transformation strategy, which consists of inserting the new offering in existing institutions.