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The authors explore how entrepreneurs with limited resources legitimated (or failed to legitimate) a new organizational category in different jurisdictions in Canada despite severe resistance. The authors identify three meso-level domains of institutional action (public, administrative, and legal), where actors intervene to change their macro-institutional environment. The findings suggest that these domains mediate the relationship between micro-level agency and macro-level institutions. The authors describe how macro-level consensus about the category legitimacy emerges through a competition between judgments embedded in different discourses and how a particular discourse attains validity, forcing other actors to change their initial unfavorable legitimacy judgments and recognize the category’s legitimacy.

Academic libraries have been moving toward a culture of assessment by curating data and making future decisions based on these data. Managing all of the data collection can be a cumbersome task with heavy time commitments. For technical services departments, this culture shift presents new challenges for management of data, job descriptions, and workflows or procedures. Pennsylvania College of Technology's Madigan Library welcomes these challenges by recognizing the goals of its institution to create critical thinking students of the twenty-first century by assessing the effectiveness of library resources, especially ones that can be accessed in a digital format. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the various quantitative and qualitative methods a library can incorporate to collect data of e-resources, organize that data into comprehensible formats, and share results and make recommendations for future collections in an ongoing, holistic assessment format. Following the college's curriculum goals, this chapter will show how the Madigan Library collects data and assesses e-resources, online teaching resources, acquisitions workflows, and other aspects of the library with ongoing assessment and data collection. Managing data and making decisions within these departments are discussed.

Brewing has experienced a considerable revival in recent years with the number of brewers in the UK being at its highest level since the 1930s (Cask Report, 2018). After decades of mergers and takeovers saw the emergence of a small number of global brewing conglomerates, many of the recently established breweries have spearheaded what has been referred to as a ‘craft beer revolution’. Typically, producing small batches of artisan brews and with small workforces, the output of craft brewers accounts for approximately 2.5% of all beer sales in the UK, but is the fastest growing sector of the drinks market. The growth of the industry mirrors that seen by artisan food producers and has led some to suggest an emerging preference for rejecting mass produced food and drink products.

Despite recognition of the craft beer industry’s emergence, growth and cultural significance, almost nothing is known about the individuals who started these new breweries, nor what their motivations for doing so were. Drawing upon 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with owner-brewers of craft breweries from across Scotland, this chapter presents findings examining owners’ backgrounds and motivations for starting their brewery. The findings show a range of motivations and expectations amongst the group of owners and provide a useful basis for making practical recommendations of how other aspiring craft beer ‘entrepreneurs’ can be best supported by the industry.

In this chapter, the authors explore the entrepreneurial nature of craft brewing. The authors find growth in the microbrewery sector has been supported through a cooperative approach between competing artisanal small firms. This has helped build competitive advantage in resistance to the dominant market forces of large brewers. Data were gathered using semi-structured interviews with 12 craft brewers in the North East of Scotland. Analysed findings are used in the design of a conceptual model on the nature of collaboration in the craft beer sector. An artisanal scene is presented, where community benefit and continued development of the craft beer movement is prioritised, over commercial and strategic growth. The typically small firms in this area share resources and support each other in a drive to wean customers away from the large mainstream producers. The authors argue that the nature of the craft beer sector seeks to actively resist market dominance, not only through product quality and marketing, but also in the entrepreneurial behaviours enacted to sustain the movement. The findings suggest a co-existence of both collaboration and competition in the strategic decisions of craft brewers. The focus is on the locally embedded connections these firms develop in the maintenance of their craft roots, with a range of complex interconnected factors linking brewer, community, and the broader industry.

The paper describes six major approaches within strategic groups research: the industrial organization perspective (the IO-view), the strategic choice perspective, the strategy types perspective, the cognitive perspective, the customer perspective, and the business definition perspective. The two most promising perspectives to make real advances in the strategic management discipline seem to be the cognitive view and the business definition perspective. The purpose of a grouping based on business definitions is to provide an insight, as objective as possible, of the industry’s substructure which also corroborates with the cognitive maps of the industry which the CEOs have in mind. From a practical point of view, the classification of firms in groups based on commonality in business definition (buyer scope, product scope, geographical scope and degree of vertical integration), allows managers to compare their own firms with comparable firms (the firms within the same group). The research concerning strategic groups in the Belgian beer brewing sector and the Belgian electrical wholesale sector is presented. The major problems within the strategic groups research are discussed.

We examine the construction of “empty categories” – that is, categories created prior to the existence of producers and consumers – and their implications for industry emergence. Drawing on the case of the ji-biru category among Japanese microbreweries, we exemplify how external actors – including governments, the media, consultants, and other entities – frequently create empty categories that are “legitimate yet not legitimated” (Vergne & Wry, 2014). We show how such empty categories generate lower entry barriers, resulting in higher founding rates and significant innovation. We highlight how empty categories impede evolutionary forces by inhibiting shared understandings of what constitutes a legitimate category member.

The revival of the modern craft beer industry has been attributed to people rediscovering their tastes for authentic and hand-crafted products from small, local and independent firms – notable in many sectors ranging from food and alcohol products to textile and furniture. While one of the grounding principles of the craft beer sector has been serving the local community, some brewers started to explore growth opportunities beyond their national borders. Some did so by pure excitement and prestige of sending their beers overseas; others sensed that their domestic markets were becoming flooded by other craft beer brands or ‘craft-washed’ beers from large beer companies. This chapter explores two sides of this going-international story – its promise and perils. The promise of international growth represents the fulfilment of the entrepreneurial mission, the opportunity to collaborate on a global level or the result of positive country reputation. While the perils of crossborder venturing are formed by country-level differences (rules, values and culture), the author brings to the fore that the socially constructed and fluid definition of craft beer forms unique constraints. The author particularly explores how the sector’s cultural boundaries and competition for authenticity with large beer companies act as liabilities during internationalisation. This chapter contributes to the extant literature on firm internationalisation by focussing on a unique dataset of internationalising craft breweries from four small open economies (Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and the Czech Republic). In that sense, it also provides valuable insights to practitioners and the general public.

This chapter explores the recent successes and lingering challenges of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the US craft beer industry. It is structured around a conversation with an industry leader – Jess Griego of Bosque Brewing – who has gained national recognition for championing these causes. The chapter is organised around three primary themes: (1) DEI initiatives at Bosque brewery, (2) the pushback the brewery has received for engaging in these types of initiatives, and (3) Ms Griego’s vision for social change within the industry.

This article applies ideas drawn from the work of Archer and Wuthnow to strategic and organizational change in the UK brewing industry from 1950 to 1990. Changes to the management of public houses formed part of the ideology of a group of ‘modernizers’ linked to broader discourses. However, these changes brought in their trail logical entailments that were seized upon by other actors to foster the growth of managerial trade unionism. From Archer are drawn ideas about contradictions between ideas at the level of what she terms the ‘cultural system’ and their relationship to conflict at the sociocultural level. From Wuthnow is taken a focus on processes of the production of culture. These ideas can contribute to broader institutionalist approaches by, in particular, helping to deepen the ‘cultural turn’ and by providing an alternative to the focus on institutional entrepreneurship.

This chapter brings together a commentary on the three chapters in the part Making and Selling Craft Beer. Highlighting key themes emerging from these chapters, they were put to a seasoned brewer who owns a microbrewery which services his own pub in rural Lincolnshire. The conclusion presents a discussion between the researcher and the brewer to unpack the everyday realities of making and selling beer with particular consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic.