Trade Associations and the Legitimation of Entrepreneurial Movements

Abstract

Trade associations are an important topic of investigation for nonprofit and voluntary sector researchers because they serve civic purposes and help to support innovative areas of entrepreneurship. We examine how local trade associations in the emerging gourmet food truck industry help to reduce uncertainty and augment industry legitimacy by (a) representing collective interests when challenged by regulators and incumbents (e.g., restaurants), (b) generating collective identity and creating cultural capital, and (c) providing a regime to manage “tragedies of the commons,” procure club goods, and promote self-regulation. We draw on social media data and narrative accounts by industry activists to explicate the evolution of the field from 2008 to 2012 in 11 cities. Findings suggest that trade associations, as an often-overlooked type of mutual benefit association, are key players in the legitimation of creative industries.

Keywords

trade associations social movements collective action

Mutual benefit associations—defined as nonprofits organized to pursue particular benefits for their members (Tschirhart, 2006)—have long been of interest to scholars of the nonprofit and voluntary sector (O’Neill, 1994). Nonetheless, they have drawn considerably less interest than the subset of mutual benefit organizations that engage in advocacy (Andrews & Edwards, 2004; Minkoff, Aisenbrey, & Agnone, 2008; Walker, McCarthy, & Baumgartner, 2011). Although it has been over 20 years since David Horton Smith (1991) suggested in these pages that it is “unreasonable” (p. 137) to exclude mutual benefit associations from the mainstream of research on nonprofits, membership associations remain a secondary focus in research on nonprofits and voluntary action. This lacuna is especially deep for trade associations, a particular type of mutual benefit association (but see Balassiano & Chandler, 2010; Hart, 2004; Knoke, 1986, 1990; Tschirhart, 2006). This is likely because trade associations are seen as being less about civic action than as creatures of the marketplace and as such, trade association research is typically found in scholarship on for-profit organizations (e.g., Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Spillman, 2012).

We argue that trade associations are a crucial type of nonprofit association that supports innovative types of entrepreneurial action, or what might be conceptualized as social movements in the marketplace (Rao, 2009). Although most research on trade associations highlights how trade associations can be dominated by elite actors and defend well-established industries against the threat of regulation or competition by substitute products and services (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Barnett, 2009; Sine, Haveman, & Tolbert, 2005), our study describes a set of trade associations that help to legitimate insurgent creative industries and to facilitate models of business activity that blend a variety of institutional logics through hybrid forms (Fernandez, 2008).

We investigate the role of trade associations in the emerging gourmet food truck industry. Although food trucks are not an entirely novel organizational form (see Shouse, 2011; Weber, 2012), the gourmet segment of the market has a self-identity, public image, and consumer niche as a distinct organizational form relative to the more traditional loncheras (aka “taco trucks”), street vendor carts, and “lunch truck” forms (Hermosillo, 2012). As we illustrate below, the new gourmet form has expanded in dramatic fashion in the past 5 years and has brought with it a field of trade associations that help to legitimate the form and guide the field toward normative institutionalization (Scott, 2008).

Studying this nascent industry offers insights into trade associations by highlighting how associations help emerging grassroots industries, which are social movement-like in nature, to develop a more stable presence, a collective identity, and a self-governance system. In particular, we highlight three features of trade associations in how they support nascent industries: (a) representing collective interests when challenged by regulators and incumbents (such as restaurants), (b) generating collective identities and creating cultural capital, and (c) managing conflict over resources.

In the next section, we begin by providing a broad overview of the central issues in scholarly understandings of trade associations. We continue by describing the industry and how trade associations came about in 10 cities to support these entrepreneurs. We then describe three specific features of how trade groups shape the industry that emerged from the data. In each case, we show how these themes connect to both the central themes of the trade group literature as well as more specific theoretical issues. We conclude the paper by highlighting the propositions derived from our exploration of trade groups in the gourmet food truck market and the potential to further develop these propositions in future research on trade associations in insurgent industries.

Trade Associations and Business Collective Action

Trade associations are voluntary membership associations with organizational members that arguably strive to restrain competition within their industry and serve as gatekeepers within their domain (e.g., Aldrich, Zimmer, Staber, & Beggs, 1994; Spillman, 2012). They are similar in many ways, then, to other market-oriented mutual benefit associations such as professional associations (e.g., Gazley, 2013; Haynes & Gazley, 2010) and labor unions, in that their lobbying efforts may generate positive spillover benefits even for those who are not members of the association (e.g., Western & Rosenfeld, 2011).

Trade associations are often seen as key players in the normative institutionalization of field practices, or what Scott (2008) defines as a type of institution that specifies “rules that introduce a prescriptive, evaluative, and obligatory dimension to social life” (p. 54). Such an understanding about the normative role of trade associations is shared by a diverse set of analysts (e.g., Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Sine et al., 2005). They, therefore, involve most directly values about preferred or desirable courses of action and the construction of standards. By contrast, regulative institutions revolve around laws and guidelines codified by the state and are most directly tied to the conferral of sociopolitical legitimacy, and cognitive institutions are associated with the recognizability of an organizational form as belonging to a broader community and fitting within its boundaries (Scott, 2008).

Although the actions of trade associations, as we describe below, have bearing on regulative institutions (through lobbying) and also on cognitive institutions (by further reinforcing the collective identity and popular recognition of the insurgent organizational form), they are primarily representative of the normative institutionalization of a field. As sources of normative institutionalization, trade associations serve as “experts” conferring authority upon claims and actors (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), reward those seen as conforming to accepted standards, and engage in a sort of soft repression against those who do not (Baum & Oliver, 1991).

Trade associations are known for facing two distinct pressures in their environments that shape their governance and whether competing associations are likely to form: logics of membership and logics of influence (Aldrich et al., 1994, p. 226). Logics of membership force trade associations to manage diverse constituent interests, especially in the dancing landscape of entrepreneurship. Governance structures in such groups must find a way to manage this diversity and aggregate preferences into effective action, while also “stabilizing relations among members” (Aldrich et al., 1994; Harris, 1998). Logics of influence regard how the association manages relations between its constituents, other industries, and the state (Aldrich et al., 1994, p. 227). These two logics are linked, in that (a) having weak external influence may make for stronger ties between members of the association by focusing attention on the class interests of the industry (e.g., Akard, 1992) and that (b) difficulties in managing member relations may make the aggregation of preferences a more fraught enterprise.

Trade associations are conceptualized as organizations that engage in collective action for mutual benefit of all industry members; however, a common theme in scholarly investigations into their actions holds that trade associations—like professional associations—disproportionately benefit the most powerful actors in the field (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Harris, 1998; Sine et al., 2005). Trade associations tend to have a minimalist structure (Aldrich et al., 1994; Halliday, Powell, & Granfors, 1987), and many of them are initially operated out of the offices of a single-member firm (Aldrich et al., 1994; Smith, 1997). As such, the most dominant firm may have a persistently outsized influence in the association’s decision making even after headquarters become freestanding. However, nascent industries facing the common enemy of a harsh regulatory environment may see social solidarity that crosscuts status and resource differentials (Jun & Shiau, 2012).

As newly formed associations, gourmet food truck associations operate more like cooperative forms than like checkbook associations. The vast majority of trade associations were founded by food truck owners who run the association on a part-time basis. Likewise, association members pay little or no dues, but they devote a lot of voluntary time attending monthly meetings and promoting the association.

The Formation of Gourmet Food Truck Associations

The origins of the gourmet food truck industry can be traced to Los Angeles, which remains the largest mobile food market in the United States. As the construction trades in Southern California declined with the housing downturn starting in 2007, many traditional lunch trucks that had serviced construction sites went out of business, leaving a surplus of cheap used trucks. Likewise, when the economy as a whole faltered a year later, consumers cut back on restaurant meals, and many younger chefs became unemployed (Weber, 2012).

Seizing these opportunities, the gourmet food truck model was developed by chefs who re-purposed used food trucks and put their talents to work in creating innovative cuisine (Stein, 2008). They created short but novel menus playing up—and even exaggerating—preexisting food trends. These menus employed many of the same logics of cuisine omnivorousness, especially “fusion,” authenticity, and freshness seen in other recent insurgent claims to high status food (Becker, 1978; DeSoucey, 2010; Johnston & Baumann, 2010; Rao, 2009). This logic of omnivorousness and sense of an insurgent identity is played up by the winking ironic names like “Shrimp Pimp,” “Chairman Bao,” or “Bananarchy” sported by many trucks.

As such, the industry is a hybrid field, taking on the technological form of traditional food trucks but adopting and even exaggerating the cultural connotations of nouveau cuisine (Stein, 2008, 2010). As Linnekin, Dermer, and Geller (2012) argue, “In many ways these modern trucks are restaurants on wheels that share as much with brick-and-mortar restaurants as they do with many traditional food trucks” (p. 4). By extension, this means that gourmet food trucks are a part of both fields, often competing for customers with fixed location restaurants.

Gourmet food trucks are also characterized by their heavy reliance on social media, especially Twitter. Twitter’s public feeds allow people to follow the latest information announced by both friends and firms (Ibrahim, 2011). The use of Twitter solves a problem the GFTI would otherwise suffer as a result of their hybrid form. While most traditional vendors either stay in one spot or make a circuit of construction sites, Twitter allows trucks the freedom to change their locations daily or even several times a day (Tway, 2011). Moreover, and crucially for our study, Twitter facilitates cultivating a loyal fan base.

Through this seemingly ideal confluence of environmental factors, the industry went from nonexistence in early 2008 to more than 1,400 trucks across the United States today.¹ Figure 1 displays the growth of 11 local gourmet truck markets as well as the establishment of their respective trade associations from mid-2008 to mid-2012. The size of the local market is measured as the number of trucks having an active Twitter account (see the appendix for details). Each metropolitan area is labeled at the month and year when it established an association, with the exception of San Francisco,² which had not yet established an association as of mid-2012.

Figure 1.

Growth of gourmet food trucks and their trade associations.

The first thing to note from this graph is the substantial growth in the number of trucks. All of the cities show growth in trucks along a shape resembling an s-curve, although when the curve tips and what asymptote it approaches varies greatly by city. Only a few dozen gourmet food truck Twitter feeds go back to mid-to-late 2008. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York all show growth throughout 2009, but the other cities do not tip until the summer of 2010. By the summer of 2011, most cities seem to be facing asymptotically constrained growth.

In response to the rapid growth of the industry, major cities began aggressively enforcing previously overlooked regulations and creating new legislation to regulate the industry (Berk & Leib, 2012; Hernández-López, 2011; Norman, Frommer, Gall, & Knepper, 2011). In turn, food trucks organized local trade associations both to defend against new regulatory threats and rollback existing unfavorable policy (Linnekin et al., 2012).

Representing the Collective Interests in New Industry

Trade associations serve predominantly as a vehicle for the realization of the collective interests of industries (Akard, 1992; Aldrich et al., 1994). Such a voice is especially important for new industries that lack legitimacy and whose diverse internal and external audiences face uncertainty about the industry’s viability. As Sine and colleagues (2005) put it, “firms that use new production or distribution technologies are especially risky because [various stakeholders] are unfamiliar with new technologies and thus are likely to be skeptical of or even hostile toward them” (p. 200). Developing a political voice for the industry and a means of identifying solutions to shared regulatory, market, and practical problems is crucial to the sustained existence of a nascent industry. Although member firms nonetheless engage in market competition with one another, logics of membership and logics of influence combine in the collective action of industry groups (Aldrich et al., 1994).

Locality-Specific Regulation and Speed Bumps to Collective Action

Food trucks are subject to overlapping municipal and state regulations. These ordinances typically pertain to business permitting and licensing, health and food preparation codes, and parking and vending location regulations (Berk & Leib, 2012; Linnekin et al., 2012; Norman et al., 2011). As summarized in Table 1, regulatory environments vary widely between the gourmet truck markets. For instance, most cities have some type of zoning restrictions on food trucks, but these range from lax to crippling (Norman et al., 2011; Weber, 2012).

Table 1.

Summary of Gourmet Food Truck Associations and their Location-Specific Regulations, as of June 2012.

				Municipality business	Duration restrictions	Proximity bans	Restricted zones
Metropolitan area	Association name	Founded	Approximate number of members	Permit/license caps	Time limits on parking	Feet from restaurants	In nonresidential areas
Boston	Boston Food Truck Alliance	December 2011	20	none	none	none	Most CBD zones
Chicago	Chicago Food Truck Association	July 2011 (disbanded January 2012)	n/a	none	2 hr	200 ft	Several, including stadium areas
Denver	Rocky Mountain Mobile Food Vendors Association	March 2012	13	none	none	200 ft	CBD
Los Angeles	Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association	January 2010	121	none	none	none	near parks
Memphis	Memphis Food Truck Alliance	April 2012	10	none	6 hr	50 ft inside, 300 ft outside CBD^a	Downtown loop, fairgrounds, historical attractions
Nashville	Nashville Food Truck Association	September 2011	22	none	none	150 ft	Restricted outside of marked designated zones
New Orleans	New Orleans Food Truck Association	April 2012	6	100	30 min	600 ft	French quarter and CBD
New York	New York City Food Truck Association	January 2011	53	3,000	none	20 ft	Many, no vending at metered parking
Philadelphia	Philadelphia Mobile Food Association	January 2012	48	none	none	none	Restricted from three zones
San Francisco	n/a	n/a	n/a	none	none	300 ft²	Few areas restricted
Washington, D.C.	D.C. Food Truck Association	January 2011	33	none	10 min unless a queue	none	Some streets in CBD

Note. Food truck and other mobile vendor regulations have been changing rapidly since 2008. This is information is accurate as of June 2012 per each municipality’s website. CBD = Central Business District.

Without waiver from business owner.

As a result of these local regulations, mobile food vendors’ associations are organized independently in each metro area as 501(c)(6)s. They are stand-alone organizations, not chapters or even affiliates of a common national organization. Even their names vary, as seen in Table 1. Locality-specific issues create a potential hurdle for the movement as a whole since each local market has a particular set of obstacles and learning curves they must manage in order to be effective. For instance, the New York City Food Truck Association (NYCFTA) lists as their number one action item reform to the explicit cap on the number of mobile vending permits in New York City. As the New York association sees it, permit caps create barriers to entry for entrepreneurs in their industry, which effectively lowers the industry’s collective voice (Weber, 2012). In contrast, the D.C. Food Truck Association’s (DCFTA) priority is reform to duration restrictions, or time limits on how long a truck can park in one location. The extreme form of a duration limit is the “ice cream truck” or “stop and wait” rule, seen in D.C., which allows trucks to vend only when hailed by a customer (Weber, 2012).

Despite their formal autonomy, the trade association movement has been surprisingly cohesive and they share a collective identity that spans localities. For example, the first gourmet food truck association was established in Los Angeles as the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors’ Association (SoCalMFVA). The association’s official start date was January 10, 2010, with one of its first tweets stating,

Welcome to the FOOD TRUCK REVOLUTION[.] We invite you to be part of the SOLUTION! (SoCalMFVA, January 10, 2010)

And without any imposed coordinated effort, the SoCalMFVA’s battle cry has been repeated as the inaugural tweet for many associations, traveling through Phoenix, New Orleans, Miami, New York, Boston, and others. As the first association, SoCalMFVA developed the food truck association model and remains the unofficial first among equals. The DCFTA not only adopted the SoCalMFVA’s bylaws for their association but they also brought the SoCalMFVA’s CEO, Matt Geller, to their first meeting with the District’s city government (Linnekin et al., 2012). Geller, on behalf of the Southern California association, has attended the inaugural meetings of several trade associations. Indeed, the movement’s admiration for the Southern California association is best summed up in this tweet from Dan Pennachietti, the president of the Philadelphia Mobile Food Association, to the SoCalMFVA:

. . . just wanted to say hello thank you for all your hard work out there it inspires us all the way here on the East. (LilDansFood, February 16, 2012)

Through the use of Twitter, the associations have been able to learn from each other, organize, and leverage each other’s success in their cities. For instance, in a tweet from Philadelphia association to the Southern California association, they ask, “SoCalMFVA Any chance I can pick your brain about the progress with City Council?” (PhillyMFA, February 8, 2012). In another exchange, a member of the Austin Food Trailer Alliance asks the Baton Rouge Mobile Food Vendor Association, “. . . are the mobile food regulations in Baton Rouge strict? Are the[y] evolving as the scene grows?” (EvilWiener, September 16, 2012).

Grappling With the Regulatory Environment and Countermobilization

Trade associations, Walker (1991) suggests, “tend to form . . . as responses to threats of unwanted government intervention . . . or when factions of an industry seek government aid or protection from competition” (p. 28; see also Olson, 1965). The need to respond directly to the regulatory environment puts trade associations in a position to engage primarily through tactics such as the filing of lawsuits, acting as strategic counsel to regulators or providing an informational subsidy to legislators (Hall & Deardorff, 2006), and other kinds of “inside” or traditional lobbying (Kollman, 1998, p. 42). Engaging with the organizational state requires a degree of expertise and professionalism, as well as an awareness of the technical aspects of legislative development (Laumann & Knoke, 1987). We see these tactics used frequently by the trade associations.

Reforming existing regulations on restrictive zones and proximity bans has been a major priority for many—if not all—food truck associations. Restrictive zones prohibit trucks from operating in particular areas, sometimes including lucrative business and entertainment districts (Berk & Leib, 2012; Tway, 2011). Whereas these regulations are arguably protectionist, proximity bans are explicitly protectionist. Proximity bans limit how close a food truck can operate near brick-and-mortar restaurants (Berk & Leib, 2012; Linnekin et al., 2012; Norman et al., 2011). In our 11 cities, these bans range from nonexistent to 600 feet.

Regulations often come at the behest of brick-and-mortar restaurants, who have well-established trade associations of their own. Generally, trade associations not only express an industry’s concerns vis-à-vis the state but also help manage contention with other industries. As Aldrich and Fiol (1994) argue, “[e]stablished organizations in related industries often strongly oppose the rise of new ventures seeking to exploit similar resources, and they may try to block these new ventures at every turn . . .” (p. 658). Restaurateur grievances begin from the premise that the trucks’ lower cost structure and potential to locate in such a way as to poach customers gives them an unfair advantage. Not surprisingly, cities that have large gourmet food truck markets are also cities known as “culinary destinations”—where the restaurant associations are the strongest. Chicago provides an example of a food truck association that was overwhelmed by the countermobilization of the incumbent restaurant industry.

Chicago has among the most restrictive mobile vending regulations, including a parking duration limit of 2 hr, a restaurant proximity ban of 200 feet, and a limit to pre-prepared food (Etter, 2010; Weber, 2012). In 2010, the Chicago Food Truck Association drafted legislation to mitigate these rules by allowing mobile food preparation and relaxing the proximity ban to 100 feet in most cases. The proposal sat in committee for a year and a half, allegedly due to lobbying and regulatory capture by the powerful Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA). Alderman Tunney, the chair of the committee, was also a prominent member and former chair of the IRA. Not only did Tunney refuse to recuse himself from the committee but also notes from an IRA meeting (including Tunney) discussed a variety of protectionist regulations including a requirement that all food truck operators must “have an existing brick-and-mortar establishment” (Eng, 2012).³ Following this unfavorable legislation, the association’s chair folded both the food truck association and his own truck in January 2012. Nonetheless, in July of 2012, Chicago eliminated its food preparation ban, although it kept its proximity ban.

Efforts to Affect the Regulatory Environment: Mobilizing Public Support

From the food truck associations’ perspective, such regulations as proximity bans prevent entrepreneurship and innovation by favoring incumbent industries, though each food truck association varies on how aggressively they pursue these issues. For instance, the Chicago association only sought to relax the city’s proximity ban, whereas the association in Southern California opposes all proximity bans. Although each trade association employs tactics of direct litigation and lobbying to affect the regulatory environment, the Southern California association is the only association to advocate interest through direct litigation (Linnekin et al., 2012). This strategy is most likely due to the fact that their CEO is a full-time organizer with a legal background and favorable case law in California makes litigation a promising tactic (see Hernández-López, 2011, and Hermosillo, 2012, for the earlier wave of lonchera political mobilization that created these precedents). Other associations have used the precedent and Los Angeles’ favorable environment as leverage in their own cities. For instance, a tweet from the New York City Food Truck Association (NYCFTA, 2012) reads, “MikeBloomberg NYC is competing w/ siliconvalley in tech. Let’s beat LA in food trucks. We don’t need investment, just fair laws.”

Trade associations not only lobby directly and through mobilizing their members but also through grassroots mobilization campaigns directed at the general public (Walker, 2009, 2010). Some associations, such as the Edison Electric Institute, have even set up an awards program for members who are most active in stimulating grassroots activities on behalf of the industry (Patterson, 2000). Similarly, the food truck associations have sought to mobilize public support for their industry and are in a particularly strong position to do so given the industry’s heavy use of social media and large base of committed customers, whose relationship to the trucks is perhaps best described as fandom (see Earl & Kimport, 2009). The associations have used Twitter followers as a measure of their overall strength as seen in the prominent boast on the New York City association’s website that their members are collectively followed by 250,000 people on Twitter and Facebook.

The associations play a central role in sustained social media advocacy campaigns for the industry. These campaigns leverage the industry’s fan base when an association creates an advocacy tool, which individual trucks then promote to their followers. An instructive example can be drawn from the DCFTA’s struggle with the “ice cream truck rule,” mentioned in Table 1 (§ 556.1-2).⁴ Since its founding in 2011, the D.C. association has been pushing for a repeal. In 2012, after police began aggressively enforcing the rule, the District’s mayor invited public comment on a draft reform bill. Their food truck association was dissatisfied with the proposed reforms since it did not exempt dessert trucks from the rule. The association quickly created a media toolkit and website, passnewregs.org . From the public comments filed with the city (DCRA, 2012), it is clear that the association was able to mobilize over 1,000 supporters, both association members and their customers, whereas essentially all 80 anti-truck comments came from self-identified owners or employees of brick-and-mortar restaurants. Hence the industry’s use of social media translates into an ability of food truck associations to mobilize supporters.

Generating Collective Identity and Cultural Capital

Trade associations, like professional associations, often bestow awards on their members (e.g., Haynes & Gazley, 2010).⁵ On the surface, awards primarily serve to create status orders within a field (English, 2005; Rossman, Esparza, & Bonacich, 2010); however, this contradicts the basic logic of mutual benefit associations, which emphasize solidarity rather than distinctions within the membership. Trade association awards are thus best understood not in terms of the direct functions of creating status orders. Rather, awards can broadly be conceived of as communal rituals that serve a logic of membership by focusing the field’s collective attention and as cultural consecration that serves a logic of influence by elevating the field’s sociopolitical legitimacy (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Anand & Watson, 2004; Bourdieu, 1993; Kreutzer & Jager, 2011). Both logics ultimately rebound to the field’s collective efficacy as focused through the trade association.

Most food truck associations organize and host culinary competitions that bestow awards, usually in the form of a cook-off in which prizes are given for food prepared at the event. Food truck competitions in this industry are big events. For instance, the D.C. association’s “Curbside Cook-Off- Trucko de Mayo” included 40 trucks and drew more than 18,500 people. The competitions are judged by high-status figures such as master chefs from Le Cordon Bleu (e.g., Austin Food Trailer Alliance), celebrity chefs, and television food critics from the Travel Channel (e.g., Baton Rouge association event). The awards are given in various categories such as “fans’ favorite,” “classic street food,” “cutting edge cuisine,” “trailblazing creation,” and “most seductive sweets.” These categories are a mix of customer-facing awards typical of low-status commercially oriented prizes and profession-facing awards typical of high-status cultural-capital-oriented prizes (English, 2005).

Awards are especially important in insurgent industries as they play a role in elevating the field’s sociopolitical legitimacy, thereby serving logics of influence. When other stakeholders mobilize against the gourmet food trucks, their complaints include argument that the trucks provide “bad cuisine,” which is a direct attack on the trucks’ cultural capital. Therefore, a major concern of the mobile food truck industry is to attain the sociopolitical legitimacy that comes with high status cuisine. More generally, insurgent fields can draw attention to the field’s accomplishments to show that excellence is possible within the field (English, 2005). This not only acclaims the particular actors who have achieved particular accomplishments but also, even more importantly, elevates the field. Legitimacy is not only intrinsically rewarding but also provides a more favorable relationship with potentially skeptical stakeholders (Rao, 2009). For instance, Hollywood created the Oscars at a time when that industry faced legitimacy problems and even regulatory threats of censorship (Baumann, 2007).

In a direct sense, awards only help create cognitive legitimacy; however, such esteem and notoriety are effective materials for a trade association to leverage in pursuing sociopolitical legitimacy. In practice, this means that politicians responsible for regulating the industry may look on it more favorably if they see it as a high-status field of the sort that has been evaluated with awards. In this respect, the associations are smart to invite the participation of expert judges as well as politicians in their cook-offs, as with the battle between the D.C. trucks and the Baltimore trucks (Maryland Mobile Food Vendors’ Association), which included Baltimore’s mayor as a judge.

Awards also stake out boundaries and press claims against other fields (Anand & Watson, 2004). For an insurgent field, this might be accomplished by pushing for one’s category to be included in the dominant field’s awards. For instance, the Grammy Awards adopted rock music and rap music only after several years of demands (Anand & Watson, 2004). This would be analogous to the industry pushing for a “Best Food Truck” award from the American Culinary Federation or the National Restaurant Association. However, an even more common tactic in insurgent fields is for the field to create their own awards to push for recognition. For instance, various genres of fiction use such awards as the Hugo (for sci-fi and fantasy) or the Edgar (for mysteries) to push their aspirations to legitimacy comparable to that of elite literary fiction (English, 2005). This strategy of creating dedicated awards is seen when food truck associations create their own awards.

Aside from the benefits that awards provide in legitimating the field to outsiders, awards promote internal cohesion. They can be understood as “tournament rituals,” and, like all rituals, they cement loyalty to the community (Anand & Watson, 2004). They serve this role both for the field in general and for the trade association specifically as its collective embodiment. That is, culinary competitions provide a pretext for assembling members together and focusing their attention, which supports the associations in pursuing their logics of membership. This both creates a subjective sense that the industry is a meaningful, distinct field and makes the association more salient as the point through which the field’s collective attention can be focused.

Managing “Tragedies of the Commons” and Procuring Club Goods

Trade groups can provide services beyond their core functions of facilitating collection action against other institutions that impinge upon the entire field. Because many of these ancillary services are excludable, they are usually understood as “selective incentives” to solicit participation from those who might otherwise be inclined to free ride on the association’s provision of public goods (Olson, 1965). A wide literature assesses the merits of the selective incentives hypothesis, but for our purposes, we will focus on the origins of an important excludable good in the industry.

As seen throughout this paper, a major concern for all stakeholders is the location of food trucks. Desirable parking spaces are scarce, especially when regulations eliminate many otherwise desirable spaces. Many social systems develop institutions for managing scarce resources (Ostrom et al., 2002). However, informal systems can devolve into conflict when faced with new entrants who do not adhere to tacit institutions.

Brooks (2009) argues that the informal code of New York street vendors gave tacit property rights to vending locations. However, the Twitter-based industry tends to see any immediately vacant space as first-come, first-serve. These two systems came into conflict when gourmet food trucks fought with street vendors and eventually with one another. As described in the Wall Street Journal (Reddy, 2010), in August of 2010, two gourmet trucks fought over a parking space near Times Square to which they had conflicting tacit claims. The NYPD evicted both trucks, and the two trucks had an ensuing feud on Twitter. Most damaging to the field, the adjacent building’s security permanently banned all food trucks from parking on that street.

In contrition, both trucks went on to become founding members of the New York City association’s with one serving as chair. The association’s goals are not only to lobby for the industry but also to manage conflict over spaces (Collins, 2011). The avoidance of conflict is not only intrinsically appealing but also promotes sociopolitical legitimacy as politicians and regulators understandably tend to see industries as undesirable when their members are getting into fist fights. The New York City association has not pursued this goal by claiming the right to allocate street parking but rather by finding new spots in the form of food truck lots (or pods) and allocating access to these. Currently, the New York City association manages four truck lots.

Of the 11 food truck associations we examined, 5 have implemented a strategy of directly or indirectly managing food truck lots. These services are generally only provided to members, and hence can be understood as a selective incentive (Olson, 1965). However, as seen in New York, lots were not developed with the intent of creating selective incentives. One of the primary goals of associations in most cities is gaining access to street-side parking. In the course of pursuing this goal, some associations have gradually come to the conclusion that this is a difficult goal. They are in a much stronger legal and political position to demand the right to park on private property when the owner consents. A law review piece by several food truck advocates “contend[s] that the truck-lot model likely represents the future of the industry” precisely because such a model is less antagonistic than curbside-vending to other stakeholders (Linnekin et al., 2012, p. 12). Therefore, managing lots may have the effect of serving as a selective incentive, but we argue that the associations have stumbled into this model as a second-best solution to policy victory.

Conclusion

This study suggests to scholars of nonprofits and voluntary action the importance of investigating trade associations and the cultural, civic, and political roles they play in supporting creative areas of entrepreneurship. Going beyond the roles that trade associations play in well-established fields, we argued that (a) trade associations can help new industries to gain representation and recognition when facing challenges by field incumbents, (b) that they help to generate a collective identity for new industries, and (c) that they help to resolve internal industry conflicts and procure club goods for their members. We did so by showing how trucks in the emerging gourmet food truck industry benefit from the activities of trade associations in their new industry. We therefore elaborate on the arguments of others who have studied the role of trade associations in the institutionalization of new industries (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Barnett, 2009; Sine et al., 2005). We go beyond these accounts by showing that trade associations are not merely the agents of elite incumbents in the field but can also be key actors in helping insurgent collective actors to pursue the cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy needed in order to sustain their innovation in the marketplace. In sum, our paper suggests several propositions for understanding trade associations in insurgent industries:

1. Trade associations for insurgent or disruptive industries will largely be oriented around conflict with incumbents.

2. Trade associations in social-movement-like industries will have much greater capacity than other industries to mobilize public support through social media.

3a. Trade associations in “high status” fields will use awards to achieve sociopolitical legitimacy.

3b. Trade associations that organize awards will increase social cohesion and solidarity in their fields.

4. Trade associations are more likely to form in nascent industries that experience conflict over the commons, broadly construed.

On a broader level, our study suggests that a more encompassing understanding of the nonprofit sector is necessary, especially in that associations that represent interests in the marketplace (trade associations), the professions (professional associations), and labor (unions). Such associations provide a particularly civic function by generating social solidarity among actors and providing the cultural tools necessary to achieve collective definitions of the situation; they, therefore, blend and hybridize the institutional logics of civil society (Clemens & Cook, 1999) with those that tend to dominate action in the market or the state. Consistent with the arguments of previous scholars (e.g., Balassiano & Chandler, 2010; Smith, 1991; Tschirhart, 2006), we maintain that associations that act for the mutual benefit of their members are a crucial constituency in the nonprofit sector, helping to bridge civil society and the diverse institutional systems of complex societies. Despite the considerable role of business in civil society today, we believe that trade associations are a particularly overlooked area of nonprofit scholarship.

This study also shines a light on a vital yet previously unstudied area of innovative entrepreneurial activity. In the span of a few short years, the gourmet truck sector has gone from being a fringe activity to one celebrated by food writers as part of a turn toward a “Food Truck Nation” (Gold, 2012), enjoyed by discerning gastronomes diffusing to other parts of the globe, and even being the subject of a popular reality television show (Shouse, 2011). The pace of such a transformation has been breathtaking, as the new field combines a well-worn cultural repertoire of American cuisine merged with motor transportation. As such, the GFTI follows the broader recent trend toward localism, naturalism, and authenticity in the supply chain and consumption of food (DeSoucey, 2010) while making use of social media to spur emergent collective action by truck operators and their fans (Linnekin et al., 2012). The convergence of these diverse social currents has made for a powerful force in the development and legitimation of this new industry and has made it such that trade associations have spread rapidly across U.S. cities.

Future research should compare mobilization by different nascent industries and follow them as they develop and mature. First, previous research has suggested that trade associations increase the founding rate indirectly by improving the regulatory environment and the cultural recognition of the new form, but that associations tend to encourage the founding of new organizations that fit the most well-recognized types of organizations within the sector (and marginalize those that use innovative technologies; Sine et al., 2005). Although we have shown that trade associations help to provide sociopolitical legitimacy to new industries and reduce the uncertainty that internal and external audiences have about the new form, it remains an open question whether associations reduce field heterogeneity. Second, the process by which trade associations are founded across localities is worthy of further investigation, especially in how key associations in leading markets such as Los Angeles have provided a nascent national-level collective identity for local trucks across the United States. Third, these associations are currently active and largely run on a voluntary basis, but this may be because the fields are young and unstable. It is unclear whether a social-movement-like industry can maintain a charismatic mobilization indefinitely or if it will sooner or later fall back into the checkbook association mode as the field stabilizes and matures.

Footnotes

Appendix

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank David Ash of the California Center for Population Research for invaluable research help, the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly guest editors Beth Gazley and Mary Tschirhart, and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

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

Notes

Author Biographies

Nicole Esparza is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on social networks and collective action in the nonprofit sector. Her current projects include social movement dynamics in the affordable housing field and homeless services.

Edward T. Walker is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include social movements, political sociology, and organizational theory. He is the author of Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy and coeditor (with Caroline Lee and Michael McQuarrie) of Democratizing Inequalities.

Gabriel Rossman is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include the production of culture and economic sociology. He recently published Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Teaches Us About the Diffusion of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2012).

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