Brewing Niches: Towards a Cognitive-Field Theory of Market Emergence


Ethan Shapiro, University of Toronto

In recent decades, culture and cognition scholars have demonstrated the necessity of understanding practice at the level of thought to clarify the background assumptions of previous social theory (DiMaggio, 1997). However, such research tends to underemphasize the ways in which cognition is embedded within external social structures, or explains this embeddedness in terms of durable, socially derived dispositions. This paper argues for a conception of fields as cognitive constraints, directing actors to draw on automatic and deliberative cognition, habitual and nonhabitual practices, nondeclarative and declarative culture to construct strategies of action within concrete relational circumstances. I first outline two dominant levels of cognition and the modal forms of culture through which actors construct strategies of action, suggesting that the use of these cultural-cognitive processes is dependent on the social contexts of practice (i.e., fields). Markets operate as fields that provide varying degrees of socio-cognitive scaffolding contingent on their stage of development – emergence, stability, or crisis. These market phases shape the degree of habituality a practice is likely to take on, the cognitive level through which it is achieved, and the type of culture it employs. I then apply this typology of practice to an empirical case of niche cultural production: the craft beer industry. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with craft brewery owners and operators, I show that this emergent market exerted key constraints on practice, making habitual/non-habitual practice and deliberative/automatic cognition more or less feasible. Instead of arising through the mere application of aesthetic dispositions, I suggest that novel cultural markets emerge, in part, through actors’ emanantmarket orientations: the deliberative, attentional process of monitoring and evaluating the positions and practices of other market actors. Finally, I discuss the implications of this cognitive-field view for sociological theories of cultural production and intermediation, market emergence and change, as well as dual-process models, the material and temporal dimensions of cultural cognition, and the cognition-structure dialectic.

This paper will be presented at the following session: