“Keeping our Mission, Changing our System”: Translation and Organizational Change in Natural Foods Co-ops

Abstract

Institutional theory has played a central role in the study of organizations for over half a century, but it often overlooks the actions of the people who bring organizations to life. This article advances an inhabited approach to institutional analysis that foregrounds the creativity of organizational members. It argues that people use local cultures to translate and respond to institutional pressures. The article analyzes qualitative data from countercultural co-op stores that have been pushed to conform to mainstream forms of business organization by a competitive market and demonstrates that translation explains why outcomes that institutional theory would not predict have come to pass.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Amy Binder, Rick Biernacki, Maria Charles, Kathleen Gillon, Joseph Schneider, the editors of The Sociological Quarterly, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments about previous drafts of this article. This research was funded in part by a Tenure-Track Reassignment Support Grant from the Center for the Humanities at Drake University.

NOTES

Notes

^‡ This article's title borrows from the title of a piece by John Sechrest and John Tappon, which appeared in the first issue of Cooperative Grocer in November 1985.

¹ The translation concept originated in Latour's work about the movement of scientific ideas through social space. Latour described translation as a recursive process that enables scientists to enroll support for their projects by creating points of convergence between the interests of other groups and the work that scientists want to do (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Latour 1987). Not only do scientists translate the interests of potential supporters, but these supporters also shape the discoveries and inventions of scientists according to their own projects. Czarniawska and Joerges (1996) adopted the concept to challenge the diffusion model of the movement of ideas across organizations. As Sahlin and Wedlin explain, “Ideas do not remain unchanged as they flow but are subject to translation. To imitate, then, is not just to copy, but also to change and innovate. As diffused ideas are translated through their circulation, and as they evolve differently in different settings, they may not only lead to homogenization but to variation and stratification” (Sahlin and Wedlin 2008:219).

² Calls for cross-fertilization between organizational studies and social movements theory, cultural sociology, and other areas of inquiry have become increasingly common (for example, see Campbell 2002; McAdam and Scott 2005; Morrill 2008).

³ This comprises a substantial portion of existing natural foods co-ops and most of those that trace their histories to the 1970s. The National Cooperative Business Association estimates that 350 food co-ops currently exist, but this figure includes organizations that do not specialize in natural foods (http://www.ncba.coop/ncba/about-co-ops/co-op-sectors/144-food-co-ops). Zwerdling (1979) has explained that the informality and high attrition rates of co-ops in the 1970s made it difficult to accurately estimate the number of stores in existence, and some of these issues persist to the present.

⁴ All articles from Cooperative Grocer are available on the magazine's website at http://www.cooperativegrocer.coop/. I obtained original issues of Moving Food from Dave Gutknecht. I conducted and transcribed all interviews.

⁵ These interviews are part of a larger project that examines the organizational development of the natural and organic foods sector in the United States. This project included 62 additional interviews with retailers, distributors, trade group representatives, policymakers, and activists. The data from these interviews inform my analysis, although I do not refer to them explicitly in this article. While a more expansive interview component with members of the co-op sector, including interviews with customers and front line workers, would surely have yielded additional information about co-op operations, I do not believe that they would challenge the findings that I report in this article.

⁶ All quotes that lack in-text citations are from interview transcriptions. I have avoided referring to interviewees by name except in those cases where they have published their thoughts and opinions under their own name in Cooperative Grocer.

⁷ Scott and Meyer (1983) argued that the diffusion of organizational models occurs differently in the “technical” sector, where organizational survival depends on efficient transactions and tight control over work and the “institutional” sector where survival depends on perceptions of an organization's legitimacy. Later research pointed to the pervasiveness of institutional forces in both organizational sectors (Dobbin 1994).