Tapping foreign markets: Construction of legitimacy through market categorization in the internationalizing craft beer industry

Literature provides insights into various mechanisms for achieving legitimacy via adaptation. Yet we know little about how internationalizing firms can break away from existing legitimacy conventions and still achieve congruence. We investigate how internationalizing firms selectively reconstruct meanings of market categories as sources of legitimacy. We qualitatively examine internationalizing craft beer industry across four countries (Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and New Zealand) and find that breweries engage in stretching, corroborating, and molding market category meanings. We extend current theorizing on legitimacy by demonstrating how actors orchestrate cultural codes of their market categories to conform to legitimacy prescriptions that matter.