Through a study of the emergent U.S. wind energy sector, 1978–1992, this paper examines how large-scale social movements external to an industry can influence the creation of new market opportunities and hence encourage entrepreneurship. We theorize that through the construction and propagation of cognitive frameworks, norms, values, and regulatory structures, and by offering a preexisting social structure, social movement organizations influence whether entrepreneurs attempt to start ventures in emerging sectors. We find that the direct and indirect effects of social resources (e.g., environmental groups) had a larger impact on entrepreneurial activity in this sector than the availability of natural resources such as land with high-quality wind. Greater numbers of environmental movement organization members increased nascent entrepreneurial activity, and this effect was mediated by favorable state regulatory policy. Greater membership numbers also enhanced the effects of important natural resources, mark...

Tilting at Windmills? The Environmental Movement and the Emergence of the U.S. Wind Energy Sector

This paper argues for an epistemological positioning of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) research beyond the lived experience of consumers. CCT, it is argued, brought sociocultural context to consumer research, not least through the introduction of existential phenomenology as a paradigm for CCT studies. However, it is time to expand the contextualization of lived consumer experiences with another contextualization, this time the one of systemic and structuring influences of market and social systems that is not necessarily felt or experienced by consumers in their daily lives, and therefore not necessarily discursively expressed. There is a need to take into consideration the context of context. We therefore suggest an epistemology for CCT that explicitly connects the structuring of macro-social explanatory frameworks with the phenomenology of lived experiences, thereby inscribing the micro-social context accounted for by the consumer in a larger socio-historical context based on the researcher’s theoretica...

Towards an epistemology of consumer culture theory: Phenomenology and the context of context

This essay comes from my forthcoming book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, which has three broad aims. The first is to provide a concept of structure for transitional times. All times are transitional. But at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure. (1) The repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is, in this book's argument, necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself: but my interest is in how that extension can be non-reproductive, generating a form from within brokenness beyond the exigencies of the current crisis, and alternatively to it too. But a few definitional problems arise from this observation. One is about what repair, or the beyond of glitch, looks like both generally and amid a catastrophe; the other is defining what kind of form of life an infrastructure is. These definitional questions are especially central to contemporary counternormative political struggle. Infrastructure is not identical to system or structure, as we currently see them, because infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure. Roads, bridges, schools, food chains, finance systems, prisons, families, districts, norms all the systems that link ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation. Paul Edwards (2003) points out that the failure of an infrastructure is ordinary in poor countries and countries at war, and people suffer through it, adapting and adjusting; but even ordinary failure opens up the potential for new organizations of life, for what Deborah Cowen (2014) has described as logistics, or creative practicality in the supply chain (see also Masco, 2014; Rubenstein, 2010). So the extension of relations in a certain direction cannot be conflated with the repair of what wasn't working. In the episode of a hiccup, the erasure of the symptom doesn't prove that the problem of metabolizing has been resolved; likewise, the reinitializing of a system that has been stalled by a glitch might involve local patching or debugging (or forgetting, if the glitch is fantasmatic), while not generating a more robust or resourceful apparatus. All one can say is, first, that an infrastructure is defined by use and movement; second, that resilience and repair don't necessarily neutralize the problem that generated the need for them, but might reproduce them. At minimum resilience organizes energies for reinhabiting the ordinary where structure finds its expression: but that's at minimum. The glitch of the present that we link to economic crisis, for example, threads through other ongoing emergencies involving the movement of bodies into and out of citizenship and other forms of being-with, occupation, and jurisdiction: so contemporary antiausterity politics point not only to new ties among disparately located and unequally precarious lives, but also mark the need for a collective struggle to determine the terms of transition for general social existence. (2) Terms of transition provide conceptual infrastructures not only as ideas but also as part of the protocols or practices that hold the world up. To attend to the terms of transition is to forge an imaginary for managing the meanwhile within damaged life's perdurance, a meanwhile that is less an end or an ethical scene than a technical political heuristic that allows for ambivalence, distraction, antagonism and inattention not to destroy collective existence. Jeremy Gilbert adapts Georges Simondon's concept of provisional unity or metastability for this matter, allowing us to see transitional structure as a loose convergence that lets a collectivity stay bound to the ordinary even as some of its forms of life are fraying, wasting, and developing offshoots among types of speculative practice from the paranoid to the queer utopian (Gilbert, 2014: 107-118). …

The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*:

Sensemaking’ is an extraordinarily influential perspective with a substantial following among management and organization scholars interested in how people appropriate and enact their ‘realities’. Organization Studies has been and remains one of the principal outlets for work that seeks either to draw on or to extend our understanding of sensemaking practices in and around organizations. The contribution of this paper is fourfold. First, we review briefly what we understand by sensemaking and some key debates which fracture the field. Second, we attend critically to eight papers published previously in Organization Studies which we discuss in terms of five broad themes: (i) how sense is made through discourse; (ii) the politics from which social forms of sensemaking emerge and the power that is inherent in it; (iii) the intertwined and recursive nature of micro-macro sensemaking processes; (iv) the strong ties which bind sensemaking and identities; and (v) the role of sensemaking processes in decision making and change. Third, while not designed to be a review of extant literature, we discuss these themes with reference to other related work, notably that published in this journal. Finally, we raise for consideration a number of potentially generative topics for further empirical and theory-building research.

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Making Sense of Sensemaking in Organization Studies

We build on Boltanski and Thevenot's theory of justification to account for the ways in which different stakeholder groups actively engage with discourses and objects to maintain the legitimacy of institutions that are relevant to their activity. We use this framework to analyse a controversy emerging from a nuclear accident which involved a large European energy company and sparked public debate on the legitimacy of nuclear power. Based on the findings, we elaborate a process model of institutional repair that explains the role of agents and the structural constraints they face in attempting to maintain legitimacy. The model enhances institutional understandings of legitimacy maintenance in three main respects: it proposes a view of legitimacy maintenance as a controversy-based process progressing through stakeholders' justifications vis-a-vis a public audience; it demonstrates the role of meta-level 'orders of worth' as multiple modalities for agreement which shape stakeholders' public justifications during controversies; and it highlights the capacities that stakeholders deploy in developing robust justifications out of a plurality of forms of agreement.

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Laurent Magne

Papers

How Institutions Think

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

Organized Uncertainty – Designing A World of Risk Management

Gouvernance et Privatisation

The Ambiguities of Experiences