Market Mediators and the Trade-offs of Legitimacy-Seeking Behaviors in a Nascent Category

The authors thank editor-in-chief Dan Levinthal and the anonymous reviewers for their guidance and suggestions. They also thank Chad Carlos and seminar participants at Melbourne Business School, the University of Maryland, IESE Business School, McGill University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Brigham Young University, the Australian National University, and the London School of Economics for their helpful comments. A previous version of this paper received the 2015 Best Paper Award at the Sustainability, Ethics, and Entrepreneurship Conference and the 2014 Outstanding Paper Award at the Alliance for Research in Corporate Sustainability Conference. The authors thank the California Certified Organic Farmers, the Rodale Institute, and the Rudolph Steiner House for providing access to their archives.