Institutional work and institutional entrepreneurship in the Ontario craft beer industry

Abstract

This paper explores how Ontario's craft brewers created new as well as disrupted and changed existing institutions at local and regional levels in the province's beer industry. Using a relational economic geography framework and a markets-as-practices perspective, this study highlights the brewer's collaborative and pro-social practices, showing how close inter-firm relations and engagement with local communities resulted in resource mobilization such as better access to financial capital and greater social capital, which mobilized public support for the industry, and ultimately which helped individual and collective institutional work efforts succeed. The findings are significant as they show how actors in the industry overcame the constraints imposed on them in an oligopolistic market dominated by multinational firms. It also posits craft brewers acted individually at a local scale as institutional entrepreneurs, revisiting criticisms around this concept. This research contributes to understanding how localized market actors can achieve broader institutional change and offers insights into the relationship between market practices and institutional work, including entrepreneurship in craft industries.