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How markets evolve is a perennial and important question in business. Building on a large qualitative data set on the coffee market comprising primary and secondary interviews, archival data, and fieldwork, the authors introduce a novel theoretical mechanism—practice expansion—to explain how ongoing institutional complexity fosters market evolution. To theorize practice expansion, the authors combine institutional logics with resource partitioning and introduce a two-by-two typology of firms evolving in markets: craft versus commercial and generalist versus specialist. The authors’ analysis, grounded in this typology, identifies three mechanisms that explain practice expansion (elaboration, translation, and transformation). The authors then show how practice expansion contributes to market evolution by increasing product diversity, broadening skills and knowledge, and enriching the market meaning system. The novel theory introduced in this article contributes to extant work by theorizing market evolution as resulting from practice expansion and by broadening our understanding of the types of firms and their interactions important to that evolution. The novel theory also points to important strategy implications for how different types of firms can contribute to and benefit from the identified evolutionary patterns and ongoing institutional complexity.

“Enabled theorizing” is a common practice in marketing scholarship. Nevertheless, this practice has recently been criticized for constraining the creation of novel theory. To advance this conversation, we conduct a grounded analysis of papers that feature enabled theorizing with the aim of describing and analyzing how enabled theorizing is practiced. Our analysis suggests that enabled theorizing marries data with analytical tools and ontological perspectives in ways that advance ongoing conversations in marketing theory and practice, as well as informing policy and methods. Based on interviews with marketing and consumer research scholars who practice enabled theorizing, we explain how researchers use enabling theories to shape research projects, how researchers select enabling lenses, and how they negotiate the review process. We discuss the implications of our analyses for theory-building in our field, and we question the notion of originality in relation to theory more generally.

Marketization—the entry of the market logic into a field originally insulated from it—is a transformative force that has reshaped many fields, including education, health care, the arts, and religion. Marketization brings a unique set of challenges for established organizations: it opens a field to market-style mechanisms of consumer choice and competition, which undermines the legitimacy of established organizations, and it creates contradictory demands for organizational actions. How can established organizations adapt to marketization? To answer this question, the authors study the adaptation of five established religious schools to the marketization of education in Brazil. They develop the novel hybridization strategy of nested coupling and explain that established organizations respond to marketization by balancing competing demands for differentiation and conformity. The authors show how religious schools nest the market logic within the religious logic by reconfiguring their resources to conform to market demands while differentiating themselves through their religious orientation. Nested coupling provides a novel strategic approach for established organizations in marketized or marketizing fields, such as hospitals, museums, and schools, to capitalize on a logic that preexists marketization and to create a unique competitive positioning in the market.

In this essay, we develop a typology of spaces. We highlight the broader dynamics at play in the structuring of space and its role in marketing and propose that spaces can be characterized as either public, market, emancipating, or segregating. These four types of space are structured along two main dynamics: a contradiction between contestation and consensus and a contrariety opposing participation to privatization. For each type, we map out existing literature and research opportunities in the study of consumption, markets, and space. We also analyze the possible transitions between the spatial types following the transformations in the arrangement of forces in society. We offer a template of how to devise novel research opportunities by providing a detailed account of the dynamics at the center of the transition from public to market spaces.

Recent scholarly work on necessity entrepreneurship has highlighted shortcomings in theoretical development underlying the construct and, by extension, limitations in our understanding of the behav...

Grounded in work on geography and markets, this article offers a conceptual framework to study the dynamics of markets through a spatial lens. The characteristics of four key spatial dimensions (place, territory, scale, and network) are explained and leveraged to provide distinct analytical vantage points and to conceptualize how various types of spaces matter differently in market dynamics. Findings from a qualitative meta-analysis identify 12 unique mechanisms tied to the four proposed spatial dimensions, which offer alternative theoretical avenues for unpacking market phenomena. These four spatial dimensions are then combined with 12 space-based mechanisms to offer novel research avenues for marketing scholars interested in market system dynamics.

How can flagships and brand stores contribute to building brands? We inquire about the relationships between store image, brand experience, brand attitude, brand attachment and brand equity using store intercepts. We find that flagships, due to the powerful brand experiences they allow, have a stronger impact on brand attitude, brand attachment and brand equity compared to brand stores. We provide retail marketers with avenues to offer increased in-store brand experiences by appealing to consumers’ emotions, senses, behaviors, and cognition.

We investigate the participation of engaged consumers in the fashion market through the lens of institutional theory. We develop theoretical insights on the unintended market-level changes that ensue when consumers who are avidly interested in a field connect to share ideas with one another. We find that consumers take on some of the institutional work previously done primarily by paid actors and introduce new forms of institutional work supportive of the field. We show that engaged consumers can precipitate the formation of new categories of actors in the field and the contestation of boundaries between established and emergent actor categories. Further, we propose that new consumer-focused institutional logics gain momentum, even while consumers support and promote preexisting logics through their practices. We compare cases where discontented market actors have brought about market changes with our investigation of one where contented consumers unintentionally precipitated market-level dynamics, and we show that the accumulation of consumers’ micro-level practices can have pervasive and profound impacts.