Pioneer organic farmers as institutional entrepreneurs in the agricultural context

Summary in the original language of the document

The study advances two lines of academic discussion. First, our study adds to the existing literature on organic farming. Even though previous literature on pioneer organic farmers has identified the attitudes among conventional farming community and social stigma as barriers to organic conversion (e.g. Rigby et al. 2001), it has not addressed the ways how pioneer organic farmers were coping with the social stigma. By demonstrating pioneer organic farmers as institutional entrepreneurs who challenged the existing institutional order by overcame the stigmatizing cultural categories at the time. Second, our paper further contributes to stigma management literature by demonstrating how stigmatization can be understood as an empowering condition, thus enabling institutional entrepreneurship. Thus, we argue that the fact that pioneer organic farmers did not accept the legitimacy of stigmatizing attributes of organic farming is an important, but not a sufficient precondition for mainstreaming the idea of organic farming.