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Institutional Maintenance through Business Collective Action: The Alcohol Industry’s Engagement with the Issue of Alcohol-Related Harm

ISBN: 978-1-78635-432-7, eISBN: 978-1-78635-431-0

Publication date: 16 December 2016

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly confronted with legitimacy threats related to the perceived social costs of their business activities. Despite a significant amount of research on the responses of individual organizations, surprisingly limited attention has been paid to the collective activities firms may engage to address such issues. In this paper, we use institutional theory as a lens for an exploratory case study of Issue-Based Industry Collective (IBIC) action in the alcohol industry. Our findings identify a new organizational form, the IBIC and inspire new research avenues at the intersection of business collective action, social issues, and institutional theory.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

Both authors contributed equally in the writing of this paper. We thank Stephen Barley, Michael Lounsbury, Sébastien Mena, Walter Powell, Jill Purdy, Sarah Soule, Tracy Thompson, the participants at the Alberta Institutions Conference in Banff 2015, and the participants in the Networks and Institutions Workshop at Stanford University in 2015 for their helpful comments on this paper and earlier versions of it. We are also greatly indebted to Martin Čadek and Nina Kovač for their excellent support with data collection. Part of this research project has been conducted while Lærke Christiansen was a SCANCOR postdoc at Stanford University.

Citation

Christiansen, L.H. and Kroezen, J.J. (2016), "Institutional Maintenance through Business Collective Action: The Alcohol Industry’s Engagement with the Issue of Alcohol-Related Harm", How Institutions Matter! (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 48B), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 101-143. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X201600048B006

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited