Maintaining market legitimacy: A discursive-hegemonic perspective on meat

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The current and ongoing planetary crisis is further challenging previously legitimized markets, yet in consumer research insight into maintaining legitimacy in markets subject to multiple forms of contestation has been overlooked. While existing research focuses on one type of contestation in isolation, we focus on multiple forms of market challenge, differentiating between practical and symbolic forms of contestation. In doing so, we contribute to consumer research literature through an examination of the differing logics at play in the process of market legitimacy maintenance. Drawing on a discursive-hegemonic perspective, we theorize two different hegemonic logics that contribute to sustaining market legitimacy. As research traditionally focuses on meaning reconstruction and negotiation in the face of contestation (often theorized as co-optation), in this research we also point out the existence of another logic of meaning, namely, naturalization.