McGill U. - Desautels Faculty of Management, Canada
Nascent industries often struggle to survive and grow. The difficulties are often amplified when core products challenge prevailing norms. We study how such industries build legitimacy through a longitudinal case study of Europe’s insect-for-food and -feed industry from 2003 to 2023. We find that at its emergence, this industry diverged into two subsegments—one focusing on insects as food for humans (more norm-challenging) and the other as feed for livestock (less norm-challenging). Each subsegment developed and built legitimacy mainly separately, but eventually converged into a unified industry driven to reduce persisting uncertainties affecting all firms. This divergence-then-convergence path challenges previous research that suggests nascent fields first form collective legitimacy before differentiation occurs. We propose that the cognitive mechanism of diverging product affordances—actors’ different perceptions of the industry core product’s potential—underpins this process. Our findings contribute to the literature on legitimacy and industry emergence by showing that divergent industry segments can eventually cohere to achieve whole-industry legitimacy while preserving each segment’s diverging approaches toward the norm-challenging nature of the core product.
