Institutional work and institutional entrepreneurship in the Ontario craft beer industry

Roy Kevin ()
Additional contact information
Roy Kevin: Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G3, Canada

ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography, 2024, vol. 68, issue 2, 97-110

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.

Keywords: craft beer; craft industry; institutional entrepreneurship; collective institutional work; markets-as-practices; relational economic geography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/zfw-2024-0066 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:zfwige:v:68:y:2024:i:2:p:97-110:n:1004

DOI: 10.1515/zfw-2024-0066

Access Statistics for this article

ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography is currently edited by Harald Bathelt and Sebastian Henn

More articles in ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().