Institutional liminality, ideological pluralism, and the pragmatic behaviours of a ‘transition entrepreneur’

Nunes, R. J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0829-4130 and Parker, G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3079-4377 (2021) Institutional liminality, ideological pluralism, and the pragmatic behaviours of a ‘transition entrepreneur’. Geoforum, 126. pp. 215-223. ISSN 0016-7185 doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.027

Abstract/Summary

We report the results of a qualitative longitudinal case study that lends credence not only to the need to reflect on competing values and outcomes of the politics and legitimation processes involved in practicing “food justice”. The study highlights ideological pluralism, pragmatism and compromise inherent to the actually occurring experiences of actors involved in organisations ostensibly created to serve a food justice agenda. This has implications for the sort of academic filters prefigured into analytical frameworks for the study of transition processes. Such filters may pre-empt criteria against which practices are judged legitimate or indeed ‘effective’. We draw on two distinct bodies of literature exhibiting useful complementarities and develop an argument around the idea of ‘liminal transition spaces’ where the institutional arrangements of an organisation may be deemed futile or unattainable, but their substitution remains uncertain. Firstly, ‘institutional logics’ and secondly, pragmatist sociology is used to advance the idea of institutional liminality, and to open a debate on the role and long-term sustainability of transition entrepreneurship among pluralist organisations.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/97846
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.027
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Henley Business School > Real Estate and Planning
Publisher	Elsevier
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