Moral markets are often initiated by the efforts of social movements to develop new spaces for the exchange of products and services that instantiate movement values and create a social good as a means of alleviating a social harm. A growing literature explores how social movements contribute to the emergence of these moral markets, but much less is known about their subsequent stages of development and the role that social movements continue to play in them. The current literature suggests that the initial entrants to moral markets make strategic decisions to suppress movement values in favor of market logics to attract new entrants and achieve scale. But what happens if initial entrants make the opposite strategic decision, defending their values instead of suppressing them? We address this question with a 30-year qualitative study of urban agriculture in Detroit, Michigan – a racially segregated city facing decades of economic decline. We trace how initial market members were impacted by the entrance of new organizations based on new institutional logics and how, in turn, their responses shaped the market’s development. We argue that social movements can maintain their institutional logic’s dominance by engaging in a process of values alignment when complementary logics enter and values defense when conflicting logics pose a threat. Our study contributes to the literature on social movements and market emergence by demonstrating that scaling moral markets does not always necessitate the lessening of movement values. Additionally, we show that race can play a foundational role in the emergence and evolution of moral markets. Finally, we enhance our understanding of institutional complexity within markets by showing how incumbent and new logics in a market interact and mutually adjust, or alternatively, how adherents to incumbent logics can “push out” new logics with which collaborative relationships fail to develop.
