Habitus emerging: The development of hybrid logics and collaborative business models in the Irish craft beer sector

Abstract

This article analyses data from 25 Irish craft beer entrepreneurs supplemented by associated web and press material, to explore how habitus emerges in a nascent entrepreneurial field. Welter’s frame of entrepreneurial contexts – business, social, spatial and institutional – is combined with Bourdieusian theory to explain the emergence of habitus. Findings show that emerging habitus is enacted through hybridisation of diverse global and local field logics, via the adoption, development and extension of their logics. It is also path-dependent on the life and career histories of a critical mass of habitus members, previously exposed to these fields. The study shows both local and global strategies of collective resource sharing – a novel approach to tackling the resource paucity typically faced by partitioned specialists facing large-scale generalists.

Keywords

Bourdieu collaboration craft brewing entrepreneur forms of capital habitus innovation local micro-breweries network

Introduction

There is some consensus that accounting for entrepreneurial processes demands an understanding of the context within which they are embedded. The ‘where’ of entrepreneurship is as vital as the ‘how’ of enterprise to which it gives rise (Zahra, 2007; Zahra et al., 2014). This unanimity, that ‘context matters, and makes the difference’ (Gartner, 2008: 364), has emerged from multiple disciplinary perspectives on entrepreneurship, including organisational sociology (Aldrich and Martinez, 2001; Jack and Anderson, 2002), regional economics and policy (Audretsch et al., 2007, 2012), strategic entrepreneurship (Ucbasaran et al., 2001; Zahra and Wright, 2011), entrepreneurial innovation (Autio et al., 2014), economic geography (Spigel, 2013; 2017), enterprise education (Drakopoulou Dodd and Hynes, 2012) and everyday entrepreneurship (Steyaert and Katz, 2004; Welter, 2011; Welter et al., 2017). This diversity of research interest mirrors the fact that context itself is, of course, multi-faceted, comprising the spheres of business, of the social, of geography and institutions (Welter, 2011: 167–168).¹

Tatli et al. (2014) demonstrate that Bourdieu’s relational theory proffers a comprehensive conceptual toolbox for exploring entrepreneurship in context, as well as for overcoming the traditional, and vexing, qualitative–quantitative and structure–agency dichotomies. Indeed, Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977, 1990), including forms of capital (1989) and habitus (1977: 52–65), has been widely deployed within entrepreneurship to consider these interlinked aspects of context identified by Welter. Bourdieusian explorations of sectoral norms, field legitimation and entrepreneurial industry entrance, are exemplified by De Clercq and Voronov’s (2009a, 2009b, 2009c) work and illustrated by their empirical studies (with Hinings) of the Ontario wine industry (Voronov et al., 2013a, 2013b). Studies of entrepreneurial networking, analysing the recursive impact of social context on entrepreneurs, have drawn upon Bourdieusian concepts, especially social capital and habitus, to consider the structures, characteristics and dynamic processes of entrepreneurial network interactions (Anderson et al., 2010, 2012; Drakopoulou Dodd and Anderson, 2007; Leitch et al., 2013). Spatial contexts are given special attention within Bourdieusian studies of transnational entrepreneurs, co-located within two social and commercial geographies and drawing on the resources of both (Drori et al., 2006, 2009; Patel and Conklin, 2009; Terjesen and Elam, 2009). Bourdieu has also been deployed to highlight the significance of place and community, as crucial spatial contexts for entrepreneurship (Gaddefors and Anderson, 2017; McKeever et al., 2014). Levy and Scully (2007) draw upon Bourdieu’s emphasis on field power to develop their understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, and De Clercq and Voronov’s (2009b) work explicitly develops parallels with neo-institutionalism, including the introduction of the concept ‘institutional legitimacy’ (pp. 805–809).

However, what such work has in common is that the contextual fields explored are established, so that entrepreneurs enter a relatively settled and stable sector, complete with ingrained norms and logics of practice, the habitus and power structures dominated by incumbents. While most entrepreneurs will indeed find themselves in just such a sectoral field, the dynamics of creative destruction also periodically engender new fields. What has yet to be explored fully is the emergence of an entrepreneurial field and its concomitant capitals, habitus and practices. Our aim within this article is to better understand how new local industrial sectors come together to form a field and how they co-develop a set of norms and modes of behaviour which shapes their practice. We hope to add to studies of entrepreneurial context, by shedding new light on the interlinked development of the business, social, spatial and institutional contexts.

The focus for this article is the nascent craft beer sector in Ireland, which has seen a dramatic upsurge in new entrepreneurial market entrants within the past four years, thus providing an excellent setting for analysis of the co-creation of emergent habitus. We draw upon data gathered during interviews in February 2016 with 25 Irish craft beer entrepreneurs and their teams, supplemented by review of associated web and press material. Iterative qualitative analysis was used to develop findings and consider their implications.

Our findings depict and analyse the emergence of this habitus, combining Welter’s frame of entrepreneurial contexts with Bourdieusian theory. We find that emerging habitus is enacted through hybridisation of diverse global and local field logics, via the adoption, development and extension of their logics and through the life and career histories of a critical mass of habitus members, previously exposed to these fields. As such, we shed new theoretical light on the processes and influences which are implicated in the emergence of habitus within a nascent entrepreneurial field. We also provide an empirical and theoretical account of an intensely collaborative high-growth entrepreneurial field, challenging more competitive and individualistic understandings of entrepreneurship.

This article is organised as follows. First, we present an overview of the craft beer sector and extant theoretical analysis of its global growth trajectory. This is followed by a more detailed overview of Bourdieusian theory. Next, we describe our methods, data collection and analysis of findings structured around Welter’s frame of entrepreneurial contexts. Finally, in the discussion and conclusions, we draw out the key contributions of this study and main implications for the sector.

The craft beer context

Institutional context

In institutional terms, brewing has been routinely subjected to legislation and regulation since ancient times, as illustrated by the extensive beer-related laws in the Code of Hammurabi, from about 1780 BC, including the death penalty for watering down beer or brewing with inferior grains (O’Gorman, 2009). Prohibition, in the United States and Canada, and wartime grain rationing provide further examples of institutional and regulatory pressures on the brewing sector (Cabras and Bamforth, 2016), as do laws around brewpubs and tied houses (Cabras and Bamforth, 2016; Danson et al., 2015). Although the death penalty is not typically a major threat these days, nevertheless, in institutionalist terms, many micro-brewing scholars have found that the changing national regulatory contexts have also provided a significant framework to populations of micro-breweries. The US deregulation of home brewing in 1976 is of special note as a facilitator of craft beer entrepreneurship and excise thresholds for beer production levies also shape inflection points around brewery size, for example (Acitelli and Magee, 2017; Argent, 2017; Cabras and Bamforth, 2016; Danson et al., 2015; Tremblay et al., 2005; Tremblay and Tremblay, 2005; Woolverton and Parcell, 2008).

Business context (industry, market)

The overall beer market, for most of the 20th century, was increasingly dominated by an ever smaller handful of major global players, and with the demise of the smaller brewers came a homogenisation in offer in terms of flavours, varieties and culture associated with beer (Woolverton and Parcell, 2008: 52). Perhaps this can explain the 22% decrease in per capita beer consumption in the United Kingdom and Ireland over the past decade (Brewers of Europe, 2015). Yet counterintuitively, the total number of UK brewers grew by 188% (BBPA, 2015). With three new breweries opening each week, and an estimated 15% rise in sales among the Society for Independent Brewer’s members (SIBA) in 2014, the United Kingdom now has more breweries per person than any country in the world. Nor is this craft beer trend confined to the United Kingdom. Accounting for 18% of all dollars spent on beer, in 2014 the craft beer sector earned nearly $20 billion in the United States. This equates to a 22% year-on-year dollar sales growth, with exports showing particularly strongly. New craft brewery openings are also running at around the 20% rate, annually (Brewers Association, 2016). Thus, the historic downward trends in terms of consolidation of production capacity is being reversed (Clemons et al., 2006).

Population ecologists use resource partition theory to contend that when a consolidated sector becomes dominated by large-scale generalists, they tend towards mass market, undifferentiated products, monopolising mainstream resources. On the socio-spatial periphery, small, niche, specialist firms can secure scant, overlooked resources and produce highly differentiated markets. Scholars argue that this is exactly what happened in the brewing market with small specialist breweries emerging in the market spaces created by the consolidation of the larger mass-market breweries (Argent, 2017; Cabras and Bamforth, 2016; Elzinga et al., 2015).

Another important sectoral idiosyncrasy is the move from domestic to commercial production, as home brewers open micro-breweries (Cabras and Higgins, 2016). Danson et al. (2015) link this modern trend to historical traditions of domestic and monastic brewing with their ethos of self-sufficiency; it is argued that the growth from home production to commercial start-ups is more prevalent than any other US industry (Elzinga et al., 2015). Even more unusually, incumbent micro-brewers also have a strong tradition of working closely with home brewers, promoting their associations, running competitions, producing the winning beers and offering advice for home brewers ready to move into micro-brewing. As Elzinga et al. (2015) point out, ‘One can hardly imagine Nike promoting the art and craft of making sports shoes at home’ (p. 248). This aspect of micro-brewing blurs boundaries between producers and consumers and can be argued to facilitate a strong sense of collaborative community, as the home brewing ethos froths over into the professional arena. From a markets perspective, the macro-generalists have maximised economies of scale and focused on very large-scale production of a limited range of undifferentiated beers (Argent, 2017), or, in the words of a brewer quoted by Danson et al. (2015: 7), ‘fizzy random crap’. This was supported by very substantial mass advertising spend (Cabras and Bamforth, 2016: 627).

Craft beers, conversely, have become a hyper-differentiated product with research showing the importance of nurturing core customer groups passionate about the product (Clemons et al., 2006). As such, good, but unremarkable, products are less likely to achieve substantial sales than more radical and experimental beers, with products that resonate with even small groups of customers securing considerable margins. Consumer behaviour is thus signalling strongly the commercial benefit of quite radical craft beer innovation and is reflective of demands for constant innovation in terms of beer styles and flavours (Woolverton and Parcell, 2008) which embody notions of novelty and variety and diverse market demands (Danson et al., 2015). This is also made manifest in wider social constructions. Micro-breweries positioning in the marketplace are as enterprising and niche with a focus on quality and diversity. This is counter to the large breweries with their focus on large-scale mass advertising and low price (Danson et al., 2015). Such diversity also makes use of the smaller scale production facilities of small breweries, better placed than large-scale competitors to produce small batch runs of different beers, and the resultant widening variety attracts still more consumers to craft beer (Danson et al., 2015). This innovative changing portfolio of beers, responding to consumer desire for hyper-differentiation, is linked to market trends within the wider food and drink sector, with emphasis on factors such as provenance, quality and variety (Danson et al., 2015). Nor are the benefits to consumers limited to taste and diversity since in such markets, esoteric consumer expertise can also be a much-valued status-generating output (Elzinga et al., 2015). Home brewers, in particular, form a very passionate and well-informed segment within the craft beer market (Argent, 2017: 7). Indeed, this market and industry amalgam has been considered as analogous to a social movement in terms of its collective oppositional stance to big brewing (Carroll, 1997; Elzinga et al., 2015; Swaminathan and Wade, 2001), which may extend to consumer behaviour by avoiding large global brands (Hede and Watne, 2013). However, in spite of this, and strong sales, managing professionalised selling is also an identified skills gap within UK craft brewing (Danson et al., 2015).

Spatial context

Place matters greatly to micro-brewing, in terms of locating in geographies where macro-generalists are not competing for resources and also as a source of enterprise meaning and belonging. Provenance, branded embeddedness in locality, is key to a microbrewery’s articulation of identity, not least as communicated to consumers² (Danson et al., 2015). Evolutionary economics has been used to explain this place dependency, particularly through the concepts of lock-in, and neolocalism. Neolocalism is where aspects of local production and the specific use of place branding are interwoven to embed a product within a specific place (Argent, 2017). This is articulated and made manifest by craft breweries as they develop their branding around a sense of place (SoP) and personify their brands with storytelling drawing on myths and folklores drawn from the locality and its history (Argent, 2017; Hede and Watne, 2013).

Lock-in is the process by which strategic decisions of producers follow established patterns of behaviour of previous others and their peers (Argent, 2017). An example of this can be found in Lamertz et al. (2005), who set out the history of Ontario’s beer industry, over the past 200 years, illustrating in detail how a new cluster of breweries have achieved legitimacy in an established organisational field through the development of a collective identity based on historical artefacts (Lamertz et al., 2005).

Social context

The closeness to consumers is arguably also rooted in the tradition of home brewing as a foundation for the launch of new breweries, so that boundaries between production and consumption are blurred, with home brewing also creating a cadre of passionate and well-informed consumers who communicate and network through brewpubs, tap houses and participation in beer clubs and festivals (Elzinga et al., 2015).

Perhaps also due to the camaraderie of the home brewing ethos, this sense of community can spill over into the production sphere per se, so that a less aggressive sectoral norm has developed, with a key feature of this industry being high levels of collaboration, as exhibited by cask swaps and collective purchasing of supplies (Cabras and Bamforth, 2016; Danson et al., 2015). Lamertz et al. (2005: 45) argue that the changes found in 200 years of Ontario brewing were related to levels of collaborative interactions, once again highlighting community the social context. Lest we run the risk of painting too rosy a picture of this rapidly growing sector, it should be noted that increased competition and firm closures have been predicted as the number of craft breweries proliferates (Danson et al., 2015).

Contextual questions

The craft beer sector, well-established in some nations, still nascent in others, can thus be seen to be characterised by a highly collaborative sectoral modus operandi, bringing together communities of producers and consumers, in pursuit of beer diversity and excellence, and the articulation of embeddedness in local place. In contrast and opposition to the macro-brewers, crafting the small scale is celebrated, making creative use of scant local resources, beyond the reach of generalist competitors. Institutional forces, most particularly licensing and fiscal structures, shape the opportunities and challenges for craft brewers, too. Table 1 summarises these findings.

Table 1.

Contextual characteristics of the global craft beer field.

	Characteristic	Source
Institutional context	Fiscal regimes which can aid or abet small-scale brewers	Cabras and Bamforth (2016: 631), Danson et al. (2015)
Institutional context	Licensing laws and alcohol regulations which frame opportunities	Argent (2017), Cabras and Bamforth (2016: 628, 634), Danson et al. (2015: X), Tremblay et al. (2005: 321), Woolverton and Parcell (2008: 52–53)
Business context	Emergence of small-scale specialists	Argent (2017: 3), Cabras and Bamforth (2016: 626–628), Carroll (1985), Carroll and Swaminathan (2000), Clemons et al. (2006: 152), Elzinga et al. (2015: 724)
	Exploitation of resource-scarce spaces, using capitals overlooked by large-scale generalists
	Home brewing as a route to craft brewery start-up	Danson et al. (2015), Elzinga et al. (2015)
	Hyperdifferentiation, and continual experimental NPD of novel beers, to meet passionate consumer demand	Clemons et al. (2006), Danson et al. (2015), Woolverton and Parcell (2008: 59, 60)
Spatial context	Humanisation of brands through local folklore, myths and heroes, time and place; historical identity	Argent (2017), Hede and Watne (2013), Lamertz et al. (2005: 4, 5)
Spatial context	Neolocalism, branded embeddedness and provenance	Argent (2017), Danson et al. (2015)
Social context	Dense networked community of brewers, home brewers, consumers	Elzinga et al. (2015: 731–732)
Social context	Collaboration and co-operations between craft brewers	Cabras and Bamforth (2016: 634), Danson et al. (2015: 4–5)

NPD: new product development.

We anticipate that an infant craft beer sector, in a country new to the industry, would likely exhibit many of the characteristics common to the international micro-brewing world. However, given the importance of local contexts, it seems likely too that this would be filtered through a more idiosyncratic lens. To make sense of these processes, and the various elements implicated in the generation of a nascent sector’s identity, structures and practices, we deploy a Bourdieusian approach. This analysis responds to calls from micro-brewing scholars for studies of new international contexts (Danson et al., 2015) and more specific examples of strategic decision-making and business models used (Cabras and Bamforth, 2016). We suggest that it might also be helpful to propose and apply a theoretical approach which takes account of all four elements of context, thus bringing together scholarship from diverse disciplines which consider the rise of craft brewing.

Exploring entrepreneurial context through a Bourdieusian lens

In this article, we describe the nascent Irish craft beer sector as a field. For Bourdieu, fields are social topologies (Martin, 2003: 20). These fields are bounded spaces comprising individual agents, who are linked together through relationships (De Clercq and Voronov, 2009a, 2009c; Drakopoulou Dodd et al., 2016; Tatli et al., 2014). While Bourdieu often uses field to write of quite wide social classes (1977, 1990), he has also routinely applied the concept to more bounded sectoral spheres in his own empirical work, including ‘that of photography, that of literature, that of the French academic world³’ (Martin, 2003: 20). Fields are inherently agonic relational topologies, where field members strive to improve their power position, by strategically deploying and increasing the forms of capital they possess (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; De Clercq and Voronov, 2009a, 2009c; Friedland, 2009; Golsorkhi et al., 2009; Levy and Scully, 2007).

Each field will require, compete for, create, trade, value and convert very specific forms of capital, idiosyncratic to the stakes of its own game. For Bourdieu (1989), these capitals extend beyond material, economic capital, including also social capital (the latent resources embedded within networked relationships with others), cultural capital (knowledge, skills, education and field-specific dispositions) and symbolic capital (legitimation and respect awarded by the field, typically in recognition of successful and appropriate attainment of other capital resources). Agents perform strategic actions so as to accumulate social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital to better their relative positions within fields (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984, 1986; Pret et al., 2016), within the accepted limits of the field’s modus operandi (habitus).

These forms of capital have received considerable individual and collective attention within entrepreneurship, with social capital having been particularly prevalent, and used, for example, in making sense of entrepreneurial leadership (Leitch et al., 2013), transnational entrepreneurship (Patel and Terjesen, 2011), entrepreneurial networking (Jack and Anderson, 2002) and communities of entrepreneurship (McKeever et al., 2014). Accordingly, there is widespread agreement in the substantial significance of social capital within entrepreneurship, as the process via which individuals can access critical resources through the relationships they build and maintain (Patel and Terjesen, 2011, 60; see 59–61 for a detailed exploration of social capital). Symbolic capital has been studied as a motivator of entrepreneurial philanthropy (Harvey et al., 2011) as well as a correlate of entrepreneurial legitimacy (De Clercq and Voronov, 2009c; Terjesen and Elam, 2009). As with all forms of capital, place has special importance here, since symbolic resources may accrue significance through their associations with specific locations (Shaw et al., 2017). Symbolic capital is the resource and related value derived through access to the cultural products of a society (De Clercq and Voronov, 2009a). Cultural capital, as industry experience and savoir-faire, facilitates this reputation building, and its lack can make it hard for entrepreneurs to achieve legitimation, as well as inhibiting their development of the requisite social capital (Beverland, 2005; Bitektine, 2011; De Clercq and Voronov, 2009c; Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001). Of special relevance to this study, cultural capital can be the main focus of a field, where creative and craft entrepreneurship is focused on the production of cultural products (Pret et al., 2016). Karataş-Özkan (2011) argues that entrepreneurial learning – increasing cultural capital – is a relational process, invoking social capital, as nascent entrepreneurs become knowledgeable as to their meso-level habitus. Economic capital, although often less prevalent in Bourdieusian studies of entrepreneurship, as a topic of interest, and as an empirical finding, is nevertheless recognised as an integral resource for venture creation and growth, and a key output from that process (Karataş-Özkan, 2011; Pret et al., 2016).

Habitus is ‘a socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 76), which shapes and co-ordinates the field’s patterns of practice, without determining them (De Clercq and Voronov, 2009b: 804–806, 2009c: 400–401). Habitus is the generative grammar of a field, the learned and shared internalisation of norms and modus operandi, which shapes unreflective action in an embodied fashion, while still leaving scope for individual strategies and practice (Anderson et al., 2010; De Clercq and Voronov, 2009c).

Habitus can be understood at both an individual and a group level. Individuals operate in multiple, overlapping fields, over their lifespan, with early experiences playing a particularly important role in how we learn the rules of a game which are thus strongly conditioned by history. Shaw et al. (2017) highlight the significance of pre-embedding within relevant, related fields to new venture establishment and the importance of a pre-start-up endowment of social, cultural, symbolic and economic capitals to this process.

At group level, habitus is a co-created system of internalised modus operandi, and entrepreneurs must learn this grammar when entering a field, if they are to behave in an acceptable conformity to the habitus and win legitimacy within the field. However, to ‘stand out’ as entrepreneurs, they also need to demonstrate some form of novelty and to deploy their capitals strategically and creatively (De Clercq and Voronov, 2009c: 402).

A locality’s shared socio-economic structures and capitals impact on the patterns of entrepreneurial practice which are enacted therein (Lee and Shaw, 2016), and locality plays a crucial role in the emergence and enactment of habitus, often in interplay with other fields that influence the community of entrepreneurs and related others (Gaddefors and Anderson, 2017; McKeever et al., 2014). Studies have highlighted, in particular, the role of local social capital in the development of successful field clusters and their knowledge spillovers (Valadiso et al., 2011).

This influence of habitus from other fields is therefore evident not only within individual entrepreneurial actions but also within the shared behaviours which a localised sector develops as a result. Further examples also illustrate this entrepreneurial cross-field hybridisation of habitus. Mutch’s (2007) analysis of an 1800s multi-sector entrepreneur, Andrew Barclay, focuses on the innovative management practices he introduced into pubs associated with his brewery, and which he drew from business experience in other fields, thus providing historical evidence of cross-field habitus hybridisation⁴ as a driving force for brewing innovation. Spigel’s (2016) study of tech entrepreneurs in contrasting Canadian locations illustrates interplays between two other fields; the local environment and the technology entrepreneurship field (TEF), a global phenomenon, heavily shaped by and aspiring to the norms of Silicon Valley, and the ‘entre-tainment’ which celebrates this hegemonic narrative. Spigel (2016) shows how mentoring practices within one location (Ottawa) substantively differ from and are less common than those in the more TEF-driven Waterloo field, explaining this divergence as the result of TEF practices, in this case, mentoring, being filtered and enacted through local habitus logics. De Clercq and Voronov deploy a Bourdieusian approach to explore the relationship between the institutional field logics of sustainability and profitability. They argue that ‘persistent logic multiplicity in a field facilitates agentic behaviour by expanding actors repertoires of possible actions and strategies’ (De Clercq and Voronov, 2011: 336).

Bourdieu’s theory, bringing together the related but distinct concepts of fields, capitals, habitus and practice thus, provides an apposite framework for analysing the interlinked facets of entrepreneurial context and their interrelationship with entrepreneurial behaviour, as these extant studies show. All of them however have considered entrepreneurs as new entrants to existing fields, facing the need to learn and enact field-specific practices and, to a greater or lesser degree, to embody the shared field habitus as their own generative grammar of action, in the struggle for scant capitals and field position. Little is yet known as to how entrepreneurial fields themselves come to be, how their common habitus is co-created and the role which capitals play in this process.

If the habitus of novel fields is analogous to that of more mature fields, we can anticipate, given the above, four main influencers of habitus emerging. First, it is probable that individual and collective history will play a very significant role in habitus generation. Second, one mechanism whereby this is enacted will be through of the interplay and hybridisation of habitus logics across sectors and fields, subject to agential strategic action (De Clercq and Voronov, 2011; Mutch, 2007; Spigel, 2016). Third, we anticipate the significance of locality, of place, to the nascent entrepreneurial habitus, not least as the locus where economic, social, cultural and symbolic capitals have been developed and become embedded (Shaw et al., 2017). Fourth, we expect that diverse combinations of all four of these capitals will be enacted collectively, as a manifestation of habitus emerging (Pret et al., 2016). The craft beer sector in Ireland is in a nascent stage, with a notable increase in new entrepreneurial market entrants within the past three years, rising from a scant handful of firms in 2013, to around 60 at the time of our study in early 2016, up from about 40 in 2015. This high trajectory context provides a relevant setting for the analysis of the co-creation of emergent habitus; its relationship to place-as-context and of the related interweaving of entrepreneurial capitals, individually and collectively. The over-arching aim of our study, then, is to explore the emergence of this distinctive field habitus, considering particularly the degree to which the Irish nascent craft beer sector’s emerging habitus drew on the individual and collective history of its members, and on patterned logics from the locality and other fields while enacting the four entrepreneurial capitals of its agents as a crucial element in the co-creation of their habitus.

Methodology

Our methodology is qualitative, with data comprising interviews with 25 network members: the founders, head brewers and key employees of Irish craft breweries. Interviewees were recruited during the entire research team’s participation at a large annual Irish beer festival, Alltech, in February 2016, and the 17 breweries interviewed represent more than a quarter of the (then) national craft brewery population and located across the four provinces of Ireland. A pilot interview, with the ‘E’ brewery, at their own premises, was conducted in October 2015, to inform and contextualise the study. Interviews lasted an average of 53 minutes.

Broad questions were used to open conversations with respondents, with our aim being to elicit the story of their brewery’s start-up, the acquisition and conversion of forms of capital and the nature and degree of their collaboration with other community members. No formal interview protocol was used, although interview aims and lines of questioning had been extensively discussed by the team, including the drafting of protocols. This preparation meant that we had a strong shared understanding of the topics to be addressed, but we felt – especially once in the field – that greater freedom for each interaction with participants was demanded by the exploratory nature of our topic.⁵ Interviews were thus unstructured, although informed by our earlier team discussions, so that we were able to combine research interests with the priorities and core narratives of special resonance for each of our participants. The interview transcript dataset comprises approximately 95,000 words. Additional data were collected from the websites, media coverage and social media presence of study participants, as well as contemporaneous field notes, totalling some 20,000 words. Because the Irish sector is still small, and each brewery so well-known, it is not ethically viable to present the usual table of participant details, without sacrificing respondent anonymity. Where publicly available material has been drawn upon, websites, media coverage, social media and so on, breweries and their members are referred to directly by name.

Iterative readings of data, and related theory, have formed the main hermeneutic by which we analysed this dataset, working with each other, data and theory, through four rounds of data theming. Each round enhanced our analysis of the data and sharpened its resonance with theory, providing a ‘sense of narrowing, as if through a vortex, gaining focus and precision as stages were revisited’ (Drakopoulou Dodd et al., 2014: 17; Smith et al., 2013). We applied Bourdieu’s forms of capital as a frame for initial categorisation of data, identifying processes where social, economic, symbolic and economic capital have been co-created, shared, invested and exploited within and through the network (Pret et al., 2016). During this pilot, all three coding authors also noted emergent themes, during our readings and re-readings of the dataset sample (Easterby-Smith et al., 1999). Three authors each coded two full interviews using this approach and subsequently compared and discussed our findings.

The team agreed that the dataset contained emergent themes around entrepreneurship processes, with all three authors having independently identified variants of these themes: acquiring entrepreneurial motivation, start-up planning, new product development (NPD), production, building distribution systems and promotion. All data were then coded using these six processes, with additional coding notes being simultaneously made as to the forms of capital enacted within each data vignette or statement, so as to compare incidents, responses and experiences (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000; Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Jack, 2010; Silverman, 2000). Simultaneously, both individually and collectively, we iteratively continued to develop our framework (Uzzi, 1997), reflecting on extant theory in the light of the developing findings, resulting in a three-part frame, comprising ‘Coming Home’ (start-up processes), ‘Crafting’ (the creation of new breweries, beers and brewing communities) and ‘Collectivity’ (sharing of capitals and co-production). This re-theming resulted in the sorting of key data excerpts into a document which ran to more than 30 pages and 15,000 words. The document was then further discussed within the team, validated against both data and theory and abstracted into the findings section of a draft paper. Following both conference presentation and peer review, of this draft, we subsequently sharpened our analysis further still, by re-theming findings into the emergence of habitus within social, spatial, business and institutional contexts. It is to these findings that we now turn.

Analysis of Findings

Institutional context

The craft brewing scene in Ireland is very young, with a handful of pioneers having entered the field some 15 years ago, but with the majority of micro-breweries launched within the past three years. The total number of brewers grew 70% in 2015 alone and now totals 64 independent breweries (Independent Craft Brewers of Ireland (ICBI), 2015). This sustained growth in Ireland, as in the United Kingdom, is mainly to be attributed to new small independent brewers (SIBA, 2015).

The institutional context was seen to be influential in the development of the sector, with economic and legislative factors providing opportunities and barriers to growth. The financial crisis provided the time frame for the initial explosion of craft brewing in Ireland, and disruptive innovation has of course been previously associated with economic stress at the institutional level. Indeed brewers talked about the ideal opportunity the recession presented for them, both in terms of providing business opportunities and in framing the perceived value that consumers and producers placed on craft beer (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Institutional context – economic environment.

Recession as catalyst for craft	‘One of the interesting things about craft beer in Ireland is it basically started pretty dramatically during a terrible recession here, I mean, the country was basically bankrupt and there was a lot of unemployment and uncertainty or job security and it was terrible here’. (I)
Impact of recession on perceived value to retailers	‘So the great thing that happened when the fucking country went tits up was the retailer had to start retailing their products, or they had to close down. So the lads that started actually retailing, which is what they’re supposed to be professionals at, have done very well for themselves, and that’s why suddenly pubs in Longford are open to selling craft beer, ‘cause they’ve seen what’s going on in pubs that are selling craft beer’. (E)
Impact of recession on perceived value to consumers	‘And on the face of things you would think that it would be a terrible time to be trying to convince consumers to be getting into a premium product where they’re having to pay a little bit more and such. But what we found was once people get an initial taste of craft beer and they gain an understanding that beer could be something that’s full of flavour and authenticity and highly varied and such, they don’t really go back. Like it’s really hard to then if you’ve got five euros in your pocket to spend that five euros on a beer that you’re not really going to enjoy’. (I)

These mainly small, young brewers struggled to access economic capital, key to business start-up and growth. Brewers expressed frustration at the inflexibility of institutional lenders who were seen in large to be highly risk-averse and ignorant of the sector (see Table 3). Banks also worked on much shorter rates of return than what was perceived as feasible by those in the industry. This means that in the main, brewers had to look for other means of funding to access economic capital, such as patient capital (Table 3).

Table 3.

Institutional context – access to economic capital.

Risk aversion of banks	‘So the brewery is growing very fast and we’re at the forefront of managing that growth and trying to ensure that we have adequate working capital, making sure that we can keep the business afloat. Obviously the banks in Ireland, they would have very little knowledge, especially in 2013, and very little interest in the craft brewing scene, so funding was always a very difficult proposition. So you’re talking about a lot of upfront investment yourself’. (K)
Patient capital	‘So we have investors, and typically in the States they want in and out within five years max. It’s much slower here in Europe. It’s seven years in Scotland say, and it’s up to ten or twelve in Ireland. If you get it back at all. But I contend that you need patient capital in the next. You won’t get that from the banks. It’s unsustainable … they closed down more businesses than any economic situation would have done’. (E)
Regional support	‘Because I’m living in the west of Ireland it’s kind of on the periphery of Europe so it would be kind of disadvantaged zone one so to speak and through the LEADER programme, which is for rural diversification, I got some support through that, yeah. Secondly then, I’m now trying Enterprise Ireland …. So they’ve taken a small percentage of … they’re a benign investor, so they’ve put 50,000 into the business and they have taken 10 per cent of the business’. (M)

The craft brewing sector in Ireland benefits from regional economic development support for start-up, exporting and growth (Enterprise Ireland, 2017). Peripheral areas of Ireland benefit from European support through the less favoured area support scheme. In addition, the economic impact of encouraging businesses that are relatively labour-intensive in these peripheral areas is recognised by local support agencies and brewers were cognisant of the opportunities presented by these potential funding schemes (Table 3).

The legislative context in which these brewers were operating presented challenges to these businesses (see Table 4). Regulation and compliance issues were seen to be resource draining in terms of economic and human capital and a diversion in terms of time from other aspects of the business as noted by Firm K:

Table 4.

Institutional context – legislative challenges.

Prohibition of on-site tastings	‘And we actually picked our building because it has good potential for a visitor’s centre/tap room. I don’t want to be a publican, I’ve no interest in be in a publican. But to be able to open a tap room that was open on maybe Fridays and Saturdays from noon until six selling nothing but what we brew on the premises and we’ve got a local cheesemaker and there’s a guy the other way so we could do a little bit of a thing like that, it would create two to four jobs almost immediately because someone has to staff it. And then brewery tours, we’re not exactly on a main tourist route but we do get tourists passing by us and unfortunately they pass by because we can’t really entice them to come in. We can’t – not to be too mercenary but we can’t monetise it really’. (P)
Accessing taps – competing with other craft	‘So everybody’s trying to sell all their beer into those few pubs that are all craft, rather than actually developing what’s in their own local area, and look, it’s much slower process, and financially it’s much more painful, trying to dig a few fucking lines around Longford, but eventually, in the long run, it’s what will be more steady’. (E)
Accessing taps – competing with large brewers	‘We don’t actually have any taps locally, we have one tap in Castlerea and we pulled it because they weren’t turning the beer fast enough and because of the money we have to invest in infrastructure if a pub isn’t selling a particular volume of beer it’s not worth having it there, plus the beer starts to spoil …. Yeah, but something I want to do this year is try and push more for local taps and a lot of it is going to be about relationship building, because ultimately your bar staff are your sales force and I simply haven’t had the time to go and shake hands and give out the t-shirts and all that kind of stuff is a requirement’. (P)

The requirement I suppose to deal with the likes of the compliance issues, you really need someone that’s fully focused on that at all times because you have the Revenue in Ireland, you have the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, we have HSE to deal with. The amount of compliance issues. (K)

A key issue raised by some of the brewers was restrictions on sales of their own beer through on-site tasting and tap rooms at breweries. This was seen by many as a key legislative challenge that they could not address:

Strictly legally we have a license as a manufacturer and wholesaler of beer, we are not allowed to sell direct to the consumer. Yeah and there’s not even a provision to get a license, if I wanted to do that I would actually have to buy a pub license. But that comes with a whole lot of certain regulations. Planning permission and I think pub licenses right now in Ireland are trading hands at about 65,000 Euros. (P)

Another key pressure was seen around accessing taps in public houses (Cabras and Bamforth, 2016; Danson et al., 2015). This was a problem in both rural areas and the cities. In rural areas, there were far fewer opportunities to access taps than in the cities and also lower competition. As noted by E,

The problem is everybody is trying to sell their craft beer in there, so all 68 breweries, or 63 or whatever it is, are all trying to fight over, and there’s only x amounts of craft taps in the city. So there’s not every pub will sell all … there’s a few pubs all craft but not very many. (E)

However, there was consensus that the key competition was with the large Brewers who have control over tied houses and the pub trade more generally:

I suspect their (Diageo’s) Irish business is 90 per cent focused on draught. They’ve created such a stranglehold on that market, them and Heineken combined, then again, coupled with BOC [gas beer dispensers], it’s very difficult for us to compete on a draught market. (P)

These harsh market practices were perceived by the brewers as anti-competitive, affecting not only their sales of draught but also their sales of product more generally. When brewers could not get access to taps, they have to sell their beer in bottles and are at the mercy of publicans or retailers to market their products for them:

I thought they’re not going to represent the product and they’re going to want to discount everything in bundle deals but the reality is if we wanted to sell beer we had to and that is the reality in Ireland. Unfortunately Ireland is, I think, maybe one of the last bastions of the unchallenged monopoly. If you have a big huge business in Ireland that completely dominates its market place you’re sitting pretty. You won’t be challenged. It’s that simple. (P)

Business context (sector, market)

Around half of our beer entrepreneurs entered this field, through brewery start-up, after a variety of more mainstream jobs in other sectors. Our sample includes, for example, designers, engineers, accountants, lawyers, finance professionals and salesmen. A minority of the sample had been previously employed by the large-scale brewing industry. A core motivation for most of these respondents was a return to the authenticity of the small-scale, independent, community-embedded artisan and the passion for excellent beer associated with this (see Table 5). However, this passionate craft narrative was combined with a recognition of market opportunities and the underwriting of the romantic myth of craft brewing with a more strategic entrepreneurial vision, as Table 7 shows.

Table 5.

Business contexts – entering the sector.

From macro-brewers, back to authentic craft basics	‘I saw how Craft beer was growing and growing and I said, I’d actually like to be involved in that end of beer rather than the bigger end of beer because you’re closer to the work. You get to appreciate beer more and you’re closer to the process. So I decided to leave a big company to join a smaller company because of my love of beer’. (C)
Commercial business models, drawn from previous professional and entrepreneurial experience	‘We’ve professionalised. I’ve stepped away from doing the brewing and I look after the business … Paddy focuses on production, we’ve dedicated sales guys, we’ve dedicated delivery girls like Yvette, and we’re a proper team … that’s going to be the key to us making the next step’. (B)
From home brewer to beer entrepreneur	‘The lad that set it up with him, he was very good at home brewing, and my son was very into home brewing, and his cousin who’s also my nephew as well, the three of them loved trying craft beers and everything, but there was very little selection in Dublin, there was very little selection six years ago, so they decided, well, why don’t we just go and start our own brewery’. (A)
Hybrid business models	‘I think the Irish industry has enormous potential if we get this right. There’s a lot of money men coming into this business now and there’s a lot of home brewers coming into this business. Neither model is going to be successful. There’s going to be some sort of a balance between the two because this business is hard work’. (K)

Several of the professional escapees in the study had a previous career history as entrepreneurs, often with their current brewery business partners, and these earlier, sometimes ongoing, businesses including professional services such as accountancy, legal services and graphic design. In these cases, the core skills and discipline norms (cultural capital and habitus) from their earlier ventures were deployed to create a business model for their breweries which exemplified and enacted these skills and norms. Often moving rapidly to larger scale production, and with very early extensive exporting, these entrepreneurial brewers bring an alternative business model to the field, with an emphasis on professionalisation and growth (see Table 6). This appreciation of commercial professionalism is not something that has been found within the wider global craft beer sector, with its vilification of the large-scale and all it stands for, including a managerial approach to brewery management.

Table 6.

Business contexts – markets and marketing.

Authentic small-scale crafting – contrast to mainstream	‘Big breweries are run by accountants, small breweries are run by brewers. In craft brewing we don’t compromise, we’re happy to pay more for better ingredients. It’s about creating beer with flavour and character’. (L)
Hyperdifferentiation – norms of innovating and experimenting	‘I wake up in the morning and I start dreaming, plotting and scheming and planning and thinking, and you’re constantly looking from within yourself and around yourself for ideas’. (I)
Hyperdifferentiation – market demands for diversity, authenticity, quality and passion	‘What craft beer consumers, along with any other artisan food consumer looks for is authenticity and they look for values and quality of product, and even your quality of product isn’t really going to be that good if you don’t really have the passion for what you’re doing’. (O)
Brand humanisation through personalisation – social media	‘Instagram has actually proven … a popular platform for us. And that is very much, this is our brewery, this is what we’re doing today, here’s our hop conditions, here’s Alex carrying a 25 kilo bag of malt for mashing for stout. Heineken are never gonna show how you do that, ‘cause it doesn’t happen. They press the button and the malt is released from the silo, and that’s it …’. (D)

This more commercially professional model was not a substitute for the wider ethos of crafting: authenticity, excellence, experimentation and collaboration were all still vital for these brewers. For example, many of these professional escapees also had a history with the craft beer community on a hobbyist level, as home brewers, enthusiastic consumers or – most often – both. This history provided a legitimating narrative to such founders, as accepted members of the wider authentic craft beer community.

Similar practices could also be seen in new craft breweries whose founders had previous careers within the, generally reviled, large-scale brewing sector. In some instances, however, it proved hard initially for these refugees from large-scale brewing to win legitimation as respected, welcomed members of the emergent craft sector in Ireland:

when they launched the brand, … there was a bit of a backlash to it. And the craft beer fans didn’t really take to it, because it wasn’t the traditional model … they weren’t a member of that community. And maybe people felt that they were trying to muscle in or whatever. (D)

Only by subsequently producing award winning beers were this brewery able to establish themselves as legitimate members of the craft beer community, with this sector-specific symbolic capital providing the foundation for the delayed accumulation of social capital through acceptance therein.

In addition to life experience in other fields, many brewers were also linked to the wider international craft beer community, through work, training, or as an active amateur and consumer. Just over a quarter of our respondents had been being trained at the world’s best recognised higher education brewing ‘schools’: VLB Berlin, University of California Davis, or Scotland’s Heriot Watt. Several years of professional brewing was also added to this knowledge, in some cases. Ireland’s tradition of migration, especially to the United Kingdom, United States and Australia can be argued to have intensified these links, given the life histories of several respondents. For others, their expertise derived more from home brewing, craft beer drinking and an informed amateur’s international insights into countries which like ‘both Australia and New Zealand have been through craft beer revolutions sort of ten years or so ago’ (I). Cultural capital was thereby ‘imported’ from the global craft beer field, and this was both dispositional in nature, relating to the ethos of the wider international craft beer movement, and incorporating cognitive cultural capital, in the form of brewing skills, education and practical experience. Economic capital, in the form of ‘breweries’ – actual physical equipment that produces beer – was also imported from the United States in a handful of cases, and even these collections of steel tanks were seen to be coming home: ‘when brewing equipment arrives in Ireland it doesn’t tend to leave …. Yeah, it stays in the family’ (I). The social capital embedded in international relational contacts continued to provide access to top-level brewing knowledge and skills, as P’s experience shows, seeking advice on how to operationally make the transition from home brewer to commercial brewer:

I put a question out there, how is this done on a commercial scale? A friend of mine from New York who is now working at a brewery in Minneapolis, he sent me an email with the detail on how they do it and this is a large enough brewery. The chief engineer from the X Brewing Company in Maine called me up and said, it turns out that he’s Irish, but he called me up and he said this is how we do it. Then when we finished the phone call he took some pictures with his phone of the machine he built for it and he sent them to me. Another brewer in Belgium sent me an email, this is how we do it in Belgium.

Turning now to the market element of the business context, we have seen that hyper-differentiation of products is common in the global craft beer field, as a means of simultaneously enacting authentic craft innovation and responding to the desire for experimental novelty from the educated customer base, as epitomised by home brewers. Very similar, and much more detailed, findings can now be reported for this nascent Irish field, most particularly in terms of enacting a craft alternative to the production processes of macro-brewers (see Table 7). The nature of innovation within the Irish craft beer sector is similarly strongly and explicitly differentiated from large-scale brewing and underpinned by a shared ethos of crafted experimentation and collaboration. From the authentic, passionate crafting perspective, a joyful ethos of ongoing experimentation is a clear hallmark of this emergent sector. This innovation is almost exclusively centred around the creation of ‘new beer styles, new beer recipes, new techniques’ (I) and is a major motivational driving force.

Table 7.

Embedded craft – coming home to Ireland.

Local place names	‘We tell the story of where we are. KN is this beach in front of the brewery, it’s an Anglicised version of an Irish word that means rabbit warren, so that kind of inspired the … the name inspired our crest, …. It springs from the locality, but it’s not overtly local’. (Q)
Local recipes and ingredients	‘…. But the heather ale, that’s the beer he was talking about. It’s based on a 2000 year old Irish recipe. There’s no hops in it at all. We use heather instead of the hops, because hops don’t grow in Ireland’. (K)
Place and local myths	‘From the goddess of the river BN we take our inspiration, from the goodness of the BN Valley we take our pure ingredients’. (A)
History and tradition revisited	‘Just small, small breweries, and a lot of them were based along the Liffy, the quays, you know, in Dublin, and then the bigger breweries like Guinness came and bought them all out, so it’s … it was an old, old tradition in Ireland a long time ago, way back in maybe twenties, thirties, even maybe before that. … so now it’s kind of come full circle, it’s come back around again’. (F)

Our respondents showed understanding of hyper-differentiation when they told us that alongside a brewery’s core offerings, an ever evolving stream of new beers must be developed to feed the pursuit of different craft taste experiences. Seasonal beers, highly experimental innovations and collaborations all serve to continually provide the craft beer drinker with novelty.

Typically, small-scale production runs allow for market testing by craft brewers, with very low risk should an experiment not meet with consumer support. Even well-established professional brewers continue to use their home brew equipment and club structure to innovate and share their newest beers, and beer festivals are also a particularly strong focus for the communal consumption of novel product offerings. Again, we see the blurring of producer and consumer roles, the collective nature of craft beer innovation, the ethos of continual experimental NPD, and the concomitant strategic advantages this confers on craft breweries. These characteristics of extreme customer proximity, linked to small runs of ever-changing experimental beers, are very hard indeed for the large-scale brewers to compete with directly, and our respondents were well aware of these strategic, market benefits of their rather romantic pursuit of craft authenticity.

Social media also had a crucial role in the celebration, commodification and communication of personalised authenticity with which the macros could not compete. Social media convey the romance of hand crafting – even to the extent of growing one’s own ingredients – and the strategic benefits of this, as a value-adding differentiator from large-scale competition. In addition to emphasising ingredient quality and authenticity, the human side of crafting is also shared with the wider crafting community through social media, again highlighting the contrast with macro-brewers and further humanising brands through personalisation. Authentic crafting, then, while labour-intensive, and demanding expensive ingredients, also affords strategic advantages, through providing a basis for attracting artisan-oriented consumers and for differentiating very clearly from the macro-brewers.

Spatial context

Our review of the global craft beer field highlighted the importance of socio-spatial context through the embedded locality, which provides specialist resources, brand identity and community. For our respondents, geographic context was still more crucial and had personal meaning, since the creation of new craft breweries – their entrepreneurial acts – was often also an ‘Irish’ act of coming home. In more than a third of the breweries, the entrepreneur or their head brewer were representatives of the almost mythic Irish narrative of the returning economic exile: ‘So I kind of had this noble idea that I was going to come back and reinvent Irish brewing and a lot of other people had the same idea about the same time’ (P).

This phenomenon has been observed more widely for returning migrants to the Irish countryside, who often ‘narrate their returns home through discourses of the rural idyll’ (Laoire, 2007: 337), not least since migrants report ‘the primary socialisation of family and community as irreplaceable for the construction of a sense of home’⁶ (Ralph, 2009: 190). The most emblematic example of such a ‘return’ to Ireland is the celebrated immigration of White Hag’s US Head Brewer, Joe Kearns, who trained as a brewer at the legendary Hopping Frog brewery in Ohio, before relocating to his family’s historical home in rural Ireland.

This coming home is about re-embedding in the history, traditions, landscape and communities of Ireland. As anticipated, individual and collective histories play a substantive role in the shared construction of nascent field habitus. This is unsurprising, since for many Irish migrants, ‘return is a search for home understood as a grounding force facilitated by a sense of belonging and continuity with the culture and the presence of kin and community networks’ (Ralph, 2009: 190). The branding of breweries and beers are also very firmly linked, often, to the ‘home’ locus, its landscape, history and traditions, as Table 8 shows, and in line with theories of neolocalism, provenance and humanising branding through SoP (Argent, 2017).

Table 8.

Collective enactment of entrepreneurial capitals.

Cuckoo brewing: sharing production facilities (economic capital)	‘And a lot of Craft brewers who don’t have a brewing facility … a lot of them might just set up with this idea and they will rent brewing facilities off one of the Craft brewers. So a lot of them get their start by brewing elsewhere. Before they can raise enough capital to invest in their own brewery. […] yeah, I mean, we did that at the start’. (C)
Sharing economic capital	‘We imploded a brite tank last year and the first thing we did was ring up one of our brewing colleagues and say, any chance you know of anyone who has a brite beer tank that they’re not using at the moment, and he said, I happen to have one, so come down on the van tomorrow and you can have it, and we borrowed it for a year’. (Q)
Sharing cultural capital	‘We started working with XXXXX, and he has helped I’d say 80% of people in this room to set up and to get brewing … and he would epitomise the brewing industry here in Ireland, it’s all about co-opetition and helping each other out’. (B)

Social context

We have noted above the importance of locality as a spatial context for Irish craft brewing, and it is thus not surprising that social embeddedness and community are also crucial to the nascent field. This field itself is viewed as a community, combining consumers, bloggers, home brewers and the craft brewers themselves. In spite of our repeated and frankly irritating questioning of this refusal to adopt a competitive stance within the field, respondents were unanimous that ‘they’re not competitors. Our competitors are Heineken and Diageo. These are our colleagues, quite seriously. As a group, we can achieve things, very definitely we regard each other as colleagues’ (Q).

Rather than being a simply rhetorical commitment to community, the social context of our field is an arena where crucial resources are shared and collaborative action is taken, including the creation of colab brews (see Tables 8 and 9). Shared marketing is also not uncommon, especially through local beer festivals. Among the most characteristic collective uses of economic capital is the practice of cuckoo or contract brewing. Here, before a new market entrant has the resources to acquire their own brewery equipment, they borrow or rent space in an existing craft brewery.⁷ Essentially, new market entrants are provided with production facilities by what could be seen as their nearest competitor. Sharing and sourcing of other materials, from tanks, to kegs, to malt and hops, is also common. Material resources are almost perceived as a communal good, held at network level, to the benefit of all. Similarly, knowledge – cultural capital – is freely shared, with new beer recipes being openly discussed, and expert advice on all areas of brewing, and launching a brewery, being liberally dispensed. While population ecologists have argued that small specialists can carve out niches through locating in areas of scant resources – beneath the notice of larger generalists, like macro-brewers – our study shows that additionally such specialists can further maximise the benefits of these resources, by sharing them within their own community. Competition is only understood in terms of the large-scale generalists.

Table 9.

The social context as the site of collaborative NPD.

Customers and home brewers	‘We have … at the early stages now of initiating home brewers competition. I think it’s very important for us to be involved with the people that are shaping the trends within the industry, and they are the bloggers, they are the home brewers, so we want to interact with them as much as possible and ensure that we are actually relevant’. (K)
Collaborative brews	‘I’m wanting to do some with somebody in north for the centennial. So in March I’ll be working with Boundary Brewing in Belfast. But that also kind of merged into a four way colab’. (K)

NPD: new product development.

Even NPD can be a community process, with the social context and the social capital within it, providing a frame whereby product innovation is sparked by specific customer requests, through home brew competitions and through collaboration within and beyond the field (see Table 9). Unique to the global craft beer sector is the very strong modus operandi of creating new collaborative brews – often one-offs – with other craft breweries, whether locally or internationally. Colabs also take place with other craft producers, from distilleries to artisan food manufacturers. Again, the home brew connection is strong, with several collaborations between commercial craft breweries and leading home brewers, sometimes through the vehicle of competitions. This practice draws on the social capital embedded in strong co-operative relationships with other brewers and artisans. These are often, technically, competitors and, in the case of home brewing, potential new market entrants. The narratives supporting this practice include a clear understanding that collaborative brewing is part of the unquestioned generative grammar, the habitus, of the global craft brewing movement: ‘Why do you do colabs?’ (Interviewer). ‘Just, I don’t know, because that’s what you do …. It’s like the natural progression of things I think’ (K).

When we queried – repeatedly and directly – this sharing of entrepreneurial capitals and collaborative NPD, three related rhetorics were deployed in answer (Table 10). First, the romantic, passionate, communitarian, artisanal narrative was frequently and clearly expressed, as an ethos, in strong recognition of the importance of habitus. Second, in strategic and commercial terms, we were told that only by combining their skills and resources could craft brewers achieve the scale and scope needed to compete with the large-scale macros (Table 10). Third, a clear imperative was set out for very high quality to be maintained across the sector, with all craft beers providing an excellent alternative to mass-produced pseudo-beers.

Table 10.

Strategic rationales for shared enactment of entrepreneurial capitals.

Shared communal ethos of collaboration	‘We all like beer. We’re all interested. I think a good community has built up. We all have created links with each other, and we all start to know each other. We use each other. I use other companies to source kegs from. They might use us to source ingredients and we kind of help each other out. I think it’s a good philosophy and ethos about beer’. (C)
Combining strengths to achieve competitive strategic scale	‘… I think the prevailing view between everybody is that for the craft beer in Ireland to grow, it’s going to lift up everybody, so there’s no point in fighting over a teeny-tiny share of the market, there’s a whole range of the market we could move into if everybody is on the same page and cooperating and working together to a certain extent’. (F)
Great quality is essential for the entire sector	‘It’s very important that everybody is making good beer. If you’ve never had a craft beer before and your first pint of craft beer is not good, then you’re going to think all craft beer is bad’. (L)

Discussion of findings

Our findings are that many of the key characteristics of the nascent Irish craft beer field were also identified within the global craft beer field. This provides clear evidence that the nascent Irish field’s habitus has been shaped by that of the wider, international field, through adoption of many of its characteristics. Just one of the wider field’s traits was not clearly represented within our Irish dataset, namely, exploitation of resource-scarce spaces, using capitals overlooked by large-scale generalists. What we found instead was communal exploitation of resources, so that each new brewery was able to draw on a shared pool of knowledge and skills, contacts and even equipment, often at zero cost. This is a novel finding for the craft beer field and suggests a significant development beyond the collaboration and co-operation which characterises the global sector. Collective exploitation of field resources by communities of small-scale specialists also adds a previously unidentified strategy to the literature on resource partition, which merits further investigation in future research. Very similar findings have recently been reported for other craft and creative sectors (Pret et al., 2016, for example), and it seems plausible that these collective enactments of shared capital may be characteristic of such sectors within the British Isles. Also novel to the Irish field was a strong personalisation of individual brewery team members, thereby highlighting the hands-on, crafting authenticity of the brewing process, typically through extensive use of social media. This acts as a deepening of hyper-differentiation and brand humanisation and serves to other the large-scale brewing production process. Here, we see another example of local developments and extensions of established global norms, suggesting an alternative mechanism by which its influences are felt, in addition to direct adoption.⁸

Two further contextual characteristics were rooted in Ireland’s tradition of migration and return, with work and training histories overseas for some brewers providing access to international cultural and social capitals and the ‘coming home’ discourse of the migrant shaping identity and practice for many brewers (Argent, 2017; Laoire, 2007; Ralph, 2009). We suggest albeit tentatively that the eventual acceptance of the former large-scale brewing employees into the craft beer family may be analogically related to this journey of departure and return home. Here, then, we find evidence of the adoption of habitus norms from the domestic national culture, clearly embedded within the nascent Irish craft beer field’s habitus. Similarly, the national legal and political field has shaped the institutional context of Irish breweries, as one would expect, determining their specific support, regulatory and fiscal environment. There are parallels for some of these characteristics within the legal context of other nations, but the specific Irish structures are equally an embodiment of national ethical and political norms.

Conclusion

This article makes a number of contributions to knowledge concerning the emergence of habitus in a new industrial sector. While prior research has highlighted the criticality of context (Anderson et al., 2010, 2012; Drakopoulou Dodd and Anderson, 2007; Leitch et al., 2013), the focus to date has been on established fields with ingrained norms, logics of practice and habitus, dominated by incumbents. What has yet to be explored in more depth is the emergence of an entrepreneurial field and its related habitus and practices. This study explores the emergence of an entrepreneurial field and the co-development of sets of norms and modes of behaviour which shapes these practices. We also provide an empirical and theoretical account of an intensely collaborative high-growth entrepreneurial field, challenging more competitive and individualistic understandings of entrepreneurship.

We find strong empirical evidence of the generation of nascent habitus through the interplay and hybridisation of habitus logics from several national and international fields, supporting previous literature (De Clercq and Voronov, 2011; Mutch, 2007; Spigel, 2016). Our findings show that the nascent Irish craft beer field’s habitus has been influenced by adoption of habitus norms and practices from the global craft beer sector, from Irish national culture, and possibly from the wider British Isles craft and creative arts field. In addition to the adoption of features of habitus, the nascent field has also exhibited development and extension of practices common within the global field, suggesting these mechanisms too are involved in the process of habitus emerging.

We highlight the substantial role of individual and collective histories in the process of habitus generation (Argent, 2017). We find novel habitus norms enacted when several brewers reported similar life experiences, such as the acceptance and practice of professional commercial norms. Similarly, the international life experiences of several of the sample provided an exposure to the global craft beer field and resulted in the ‘importation’ of cultural capital in the form of skills, disposition, qualifications; social capital through an ongoing network of global craft beer contacts; and even economic capital such as brewery equipment. We note that in each of these cases, around a third of respondents had similar experiences to each other and speculate that some such critical mass may be required for individual life experiences to shape collective habitus. However, testing this speculation would require large-scale quantitative analysis far beyond the scope of this study.

Our findings indicate that a strongly local embeddedness was significant for the development of branding, belonging and reputation (Gaddefors and Anderson, 2017; McKeever et al., 2014; Shaw et al., 2017). The sharing of capitals within the local community is a notable example of the importance of such embeddedness. However, and perhaps given the Irish norm of migration and return, as well as the wider influence of the global craft beer movement, local embeddedness only tells part of the story. Access to vital capitals was also secured from the global field, which, due to the cognate nature of so much of the emergent Irish craft beer habitus, was quite easy for Irish brewers to navigate. The reach of these new small-scale specialists extended far beyond their own specific resource peripherality, through the norms and practices of the global craft beer field’s habitus. Again, we see a collective strategy deployed to combat the potential resource scarcity faced by those who compete against large-scale generalists (Jack and Anderson, 2002; Pret et al., 2016).

Thus, the major contribution of this article is to explain a habitus emerging empirically demonstrating that this is enacted through hybridisation of diverse global and local habitus logics, via adoption, development and extension of logics drawn from other fields, and path-dependent on the life and career histories of a critical mass of habitus members, previously exposed to these fields. In addition, we reveal both local and global strategies of collective resource sharing to address the resource paucity typically faced by partitioned specialists facing, together, competition from other large-scale generalists. Furthermore, we contribute to the growing literature on entrepreneurial context, by deploying Welter’s frame to analyse Bourdieusian fields, demonstrating the usefulness of this frame in empirical application.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Pearse Lyons, Maeve Desmond, organisers and participants of the Alltech Craft Brews and Food Fair 2016. In particular, we appreciate craft brewers’ participation in our study. We are grateful to anonymous referees and delegates of the Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference 2016 (at which an earlier version of this paper was presented with a ‘best paper’ award).

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Sarah Drakopoulou Dodd works in the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, at the University of Strathclyde. Her research focuses on collaborative forms, processes and relationships within entrepreneurship, as set within its socio-cultural context.

Juliette Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Marketing, at the University of Strathclyde. Her research interests are focused around alternative and non-mainstream markets and the practices engaged in by all stakeholders in these markets.

Ciarán Mac an Bhaird is Assistant Professor of Business and Management, and founder of the UStart Accelerator programme at Dublin City University. His research focuses on capital structure and resourcing the small firm economy, and he advises nascent enterprises in the Irish craft brewing sector.

Angelo P. Bisignano is a Principal Lecturer in Strategic Management at Nottingham Trent University. Angelo holds a Ph.D. in entrepreneurship and supports the small breweries in the UK East Midlands in their internationalization processes.

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