Institutional liminality, ideological pluralism and the pragmatic behaviours of a ‘transition entrepreneur’

•Perceptions of legitimate agency often framed for the purposes of collective action.•Transition entrepreneurs defy norms against which practices are judged legitimate.•Ideological pluralism instantiates pragmatic behaviours toward collective action.•Competing institutional logics can result in conf...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geoforum 2021-11, Vol.126, p.215-223
Main Authors: Nunes, Richard J., Parker, Gavin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Case studies
Cooperative
Entrepreneurship
Filters
Food
Food justice
Food processing
Ideology
Justice
Legitimacy
Legitimation
Liminality
Pluralism
Pragmatism
Sociology
Sustainability
Transition
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Summary:•Perceptions of legitimate agency often framed for the purposes of collective action.•Transition entrepreneurs defy norms against which practices are judged legitimate.•Ideological pluralism instantiates pragmatic behaviours toward collective action.•Competing institutional logics can result in conflicting claims to legitimacy.•Legitimacy actually arises at the institutional liminality of opposing agendas. We report the results of a qualitative longitudinal case study that lends credence to the need to reflect further on the micro politics and legitimation processes of practicing “food justice”. The study highlights the ideological pluralism, pragmatism and compromise inherent to the actually occurring experiences of actors involved in organisations ostensibly created to serve a food justice agenda. This has implications for the sort of academic filters prefigured into analytical frameworks for the study of transition processes. Such filters may pre-empt criteria against which practices are judged legitimate or indeed ‘effective’. We draw on two distinct bodies of literature exhibiting useful complementarities and develop an argument around the idea of ‘liminal transition spaces’ where the institutional arrangements of an organisation may be deemed futile or unattainable, but its substitution remains uncertain. Firstly, ‘institutional logics’ and secondly, pragmatist sociology is used to advance the idea of institutional liminality, and to open a debate on the role and long-term sustainability of transition entrepreneurship among pluralist organisations.
ISSN:0016-7185
1872-9398
DOI:10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.027