Complicating conventionalisation

ABSTRACT

A central theme of the literature on alternative food and drink markets is whether these efforts maintain their alterity as they grow, or whether they conventionalise. We argue that conventionalisation is not inevitable. Furthermore, analysts of the consumer version of this process, co-optation theory, often fail to recognise that alternative entrants often transform both sides of a market. In research at a food swap, we found that the desire to enact alterity became so exaggerated that participants were forced to ‘thread an oppositional needle’ as they rejected many offerings. We theorise that oppositional identities can at times be a bar to new markets. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this finding for the larger ‘sharing’ economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• cooptation
• conventionalization
• alternative foods
• sharing economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliet B. Schor

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College and the author of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (The Penguin Press). She is currently researching the sharing economy. She has published widely on issues of time, consumption and environmental sustainability.

Connor J. Fitzmaurice

Connor Fitzmaurice is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Boston University (USA), and received his Bachelors of Arts degree from Boston College (USA) in 2010. His research focuses on topics relating to food production and consumption, emphasizing the intersections of economic markets and cultural values. He has published on sustainable food systems, processes of categorization and classification in elite wine discourse, and alternative market arrangements and systems of valuation in the emergent “sharing economy.”