Hail the snail: Hegemonic struggles in the Slow Food movement Koen van Bommel Warwick Business School, UK André Spicer Cass Business School, UK August 2011 Forthcoming in: Organization Studies. 1 Koen van Bommel is a doctoral student at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He is a former consultant, specializing in corporate sustainability. His main research interests involve organizational responses to the call for more sustainable business, the functioning of social movements, and institutional theory. André Spicer is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Cass Business School, City University London. His work focuses on developing a political theory of organization. He has conducted research on entrepreneurship, globalization in public broadcasting, labour disputes in ports, organizational resistance, open source organizing, and leadership. He is co-author of Contesting the Corporation (Cambridge University Press) and Unmasking the Entrepreneur (Edward Elgar). 2 Abstract This paper explores how new institutional fields are established and extended. We argue that they are created by social movements engaging in hegemonic struggles and which develop social movement strategies, articulate discourses and construct nodal points. We examine how this process played out during the creation and development of the Slow Food movement. We argue that the positioning of Slow Food as a new field was based particularly on using multiple strategies, increasing the stock of floating signifiers, and abstracting the nodal points used. This mobilized new actors and enabled a more extensive collective identity which allowed the movement to progress, extend, and elevate the field of Slow Food. The field of Slow Food was transformed from appealing only to gastronomes to becoming a broader field that encompassed social justice activists and environmentalists. This study then contributes to the existing literature on field formation, the role of social movements in this process, and political dynamics within social movements. We focus on the importance of hegemony in the institutional processes around field formation by drawing out how Slow Food created a field through the forging of hegemonic links among a range of disparate actors. Keywords Discourse analysis, hegemony, Laclau, Slow Food, social movements, resistance, media representations. Corresponding author: Koen van Bommel, Department of Industrial Relations and Organizational Behaviour, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected] 3 Introduction Since the early 1990s, many commentators have argued that the dominance of malbouffe (bad food) has a variety of negative consequences. For instance, it is ruinous for farmers, results in dangerous and low paid jobs for food processors, has disastrous environmental consequences for communities, results in poor diets with associated health consequences for consumers and, above all, creates disenchantment with the experience of cooking and eating (Bove & Dufour, 2002; Honore, 2004; Ritzer, 1996; Schlosser, 2002). Some groups have sought to challenge bad food through the development of movements such as organic food (Skinner, 2007) and fair trade food (Reinecke, 2010). These food movements have led to new fields of investigation by bringing together a set of ‘organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resources and product consumers … and other organizations that produce similar services and products’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). They have crafted ‘distinctive ‘rules of the game’, relational networks and resource distributions that differentiate multiple levels of actors and models for action’ (Rao, Morrill & Zald, 2000, p. 251). For some time, researchers have puzzled over how new fields are created (e.g. DiMaggio, 1991). Some have suggested that they arise from the structures of existing fields. That is, legitimacy is built through local adaptations that are extensively copied by the actors in a field (Baron, Dobbin & Devereaux Jennings, 1986; Tolbert & Zucker, 1983). Fligstein (2001) argued that external environmental shocks that give rise to significant institutional changes are the main driver of field creation. Contradictions among different logics have also been emphasized by various scholars (e.g. Lounsbury, 2007; Reay & Hinings, 2009; Scott, Ruef, Mendel & Coronna, 2000; Seo & Creed, 2002). Others emphasize the importance of strategic action on the part of the various groups seeking to establish new fields (Beckert, 1999; Maguire, Hardy & Lawrence, 2004; Perkmann & Spicer, 2007). An important form of this strategic action is the social movement (Davis, McAdam, Scott & Zald, 2005; Rao, Monin & Durand, 2003; Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008). The social movement comprises ‘collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities’ (Tarrow, 1994, pp. 3-4). Existing studies emphasize how movements create new fields by mobilizing resources (e.g. McCarthy & Zald 1987), taking advantage of political opportunities (e.g. Tilly, 1978) and framing issues in advantageous ways (e.g. Creed, Scully & Austin, 2002). However, they largely ignore how social movements pursue their agendas by engaging in hegemonic struggle (Levy & Scully, 2007). In order to provide an account of how social movements engage in these struggles, we turn to Ernesto Laclau’s social theory of hegemony (Laclau, 1990, 1995, 2005; Laclau & Mouffe 1985). Drawing on a study of the Slow Food movement, we ask how this group established and subsequently extended the field of Slow Food. Because previous studies highlight that changing the collective representations of an issue in the mass media is an 4 important way in which new institutional fields are created (Lawrence & Phillips 2004; Rao, 2004), we focus, in particular, on mass media representations of the Slow Food movement. We argue that this movement, or at least dominant coalitions within the movement, created this new field by employing a broad range of protest strategies that combine autonomy and engagement. This mobilized apparently unrelated constituents including gourmets, farmers and environmentalists. In addition, the movement increased the stock of floating signifiers it used to describe its activities and evoked increasingly abstract ‘nodal points’ which gave some coherence to its diverse activities. This helped to foster a sense of identification among the increasingly different constituents. By mobilizing diverse constituents and fostering a broad collective identity, the Slow Food movement was able to craft hegemonic links between previously relatively separate groups. These links extended the field of Slow Food from a niche area that appealed largely to an audience of gourmets, into a broader field with a similarly much broader audience. By these means, the Slow Food movement has created a dynamic field that includes a range of organizations including farms, research institutions, restaurants, activists, food producers and policy-making bodies. Our investigation of this empirical setting makes three broad theoretical contributions. First, we build on existing accounts of the formation of new fields (e.g. DiMaggio 1991; Fligstein, 2001; Maguire et al., 2004; Weber, Heinze & DeSoucey, 2008). We examine the formation and transformation of the Slow Food movement. By doing so we identify how a social movement can create and widen a field by advancing practices, extending the reach of the field, and elevating the issues it claims to address. By identifying these mechanisms, we demonstrate that if social movements want to craft broader fields that sustain a wide range of actors, they need to create hegemonic links between their specific activities and the more general concerns of other actors. Second, we extend the handful of existing accounts of the role of social movements in field formation (e.g. Rao, 2009; Weber et al., 2008) by moving beyond the existing focus on resource mobilization, opportunity structures and framing to considering the role of hegemony in the creation of a new field. We highlight how social movements build and extend fields by mobilizing new linkages between actors and formulating a novel language and collective identity, which hold diverse actors together. This allows social movements to extend their claims beyond a narrow focus and involve a broader constituency. It is a reminder that social movements can establish niche fields that will attract a narrow range of devotees (as Slow Food did in its early days), but to increase the appeal, the movement needs to create hegemonic linkages with other social movements. The third theoretical contribution is that we extend existing accounts of the political processes involved in the formation and transformation of a social movement. In particular, we consider the role of hegemony in social movements and institutional processes more generally (e.g. Spicer & Böhm, 2007). Existing work on how new 5 fields become established tends to focus either on processes of mobilization (e.g. Levy & Scully, 2007) or on the production of new identities that bind diverse groups together (e.g. Otto & Böhm, 2006). We show that social movements seeking to craft hegemony in a field bring together both of these processes, in a self-reinforcing way. They mobilize by building alliances with a range of diverse actors, often with quite different sets of interests. At the