In this project, we study how market systems change takes place and the forces and processes that govern such change in the move towards sustainability. We examine this process in the context of the U.S. food industry from 2009 to 2020. Conceptually, we use a systems theory approach to guide our grounded theory development. Empirically, we use a mixed method approach that combines 1) manual coding of news sources over the period 2009-2020 and interviews with 29 experts from firms, consumer and industry groups in the food sector with 2) computational text analysis of a large corpus of news articles and industry reports.
By doing so we hope to make three contributions. First, while most marketing research has focused on corporate or product sustainability (Kastikeas et al., 2016), we examine the sustainability of systems and change at the system rather than firm or consumer levels. We are therefore able to study change in the overall business environment rather than merely at the dyadic level of firm-customer interactions. Second, we advance the use of textual analysis and machine learning tools in marketing research (Berger et al., 2020), an area where marketing lags behind other fields. Third, we find that change towards sustainability in the food system is a result of the interplay between two subsystems: the ''traditional'' food subsystem centered around the social norm of meat/milk, and the ''new'' disruptive subsystem centered around the counter-norm of plant-based meat/milk. The position of actors within the system is contingent upon their proximity to/distance from the societal norm of meat/milk, and the counter-norm of plant-based meat/milk. Further, most interactions between the two subsystems happen at the boundary of the bigger system, and change is driven by those liminal actors who hold the common ground between them.
