Cultivating the Niche


CULTIVATING THE NICHE: A STUDY OF THE ORIGINS AND 

CONSEQUENCES OF STANDARDS-BASED CERTIFICATION 

ORGANIZATIONS IN THE U.S. ORGANIC FOOD INDUSTRY 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Dissertation 

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School 

of Cornell University 

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by 

Brandon H. Lee 

January 2007 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 2007 Brandon H. Lee 

 



CULTIVATING THE NICHE: A STUDY OF THE ORIGINS AND 

CONSEQUENCES OF STANDARDS-BASED CERTIFICATION 

ORGANIZATIONS IN THE U.S. ORGANIC FOOD INDUSTRY 

Brandon H. Lee, Ph.D.  

Cornell University 2007 

 

Standards-based certification organizations (SBCOs) as a source of market order have 

been largely neglected as a topic of study by social scientists, particularly when 

compared to other sources of order such as the state and the market. This dissertation 

presents three papers that examine the origins of SBCOs, their impact on broader 

regulatory structure, and how they influence market entry and exit rates in the U.S. 

organic food industry.  

The first paper, “Fences and Gates: An Inductive Case Study of Standards-

Based Certification Organizations in the U.S. Organic Food Industry,” employs 

qualitative evidence to develop a typology of SBCOs and then quantitatively assesses 

what facilitating conditions led to the founding of distinctive SBCO forms in U.S. 

states. Findings from this paper suggest that the codification of standards and 

certification processes initially served as a “fence” that established a boundary around 

the concept of organic but which subsequently served as a “gate” by which industry 

outsiders entered the organic industry and engendered endogenous field-level change, 

significantly altering the trajectory of the market.  

The second paper, “Mechanisms Generating Variation: Regulatory Change in 

the Organic Food Industry,” empirically examines how different SBCO forms 

influence variation and evolution in the content of industry law. This approach moves 

beyond extant dichotomous conceptualizations of regulation that dominate 

institutional analyses of regulatory structure. The results of this paper provide answers 



to questions of when and under what conditions private governance organizations 

influence variation and evolution of industry regulation.  

The third paper, “Certifying the Harvest: The Role of Standards-Based 

Certification Organizations in Market Entry and Exit Dynamics,” examines how 

SBCOs, through key processes of creation of standards, advocacy, verification of 

compliance, and endorsement, influence patterns of market entry and exit of organic 

producers. Drawing on state-level and firm-level data sets spanning a 15-year period 

(1986–2000), I show that SBCOs stimulate entry into the market and that the 

certification they provide to individual firms inhibits market exit and moderates the 

competitive effects of increasing form density.   
 



 

iii 

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

Brandon Lee received his undergraduate degree in political science and anthropology 

from Brigham Young University in 1999. During his undergraduate studies, he spent a 

year conducting ethnographic research on land tenure, indigenous legal systems, and 

linguistics in Spanish-speaking communities in Mexico and K’iche-speaking 

communities in Guatemala. After graduation, he directed student field study programs 

in Mexico and Guatemala and served as a consultant to the energy industry. He 

received his M.S. in organizational behavior from the School of Industrial and Labor 

Relations at Cornell University in 2003 and received his Ph.D. in the same field and 

school in January 2007. He recently accepted a position at London Business School as 

an assistant professor of strategic and international management. Brandon is married 

to Josie Lauritsen; their son, Noah Benjamin, was born in June of 2004.      



 

iv 

DEDICATION 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Josie 



 

v 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the support 

of a number of people and organizations. I first acknowledge the key role played by 

the late Bob Stern in recruiting me to Cornell and encouraging me to pursue a Ph.D. 

Working as his research assistant in the late stages of his life both inspired and 

humbled me. More recently, I have benefited greatly from the help of my committee, 

Pam Tolbert, David Strang, and Wes Sine. I owe much to Pam Tolbert for becoming 

my chair late in the process. Her keen insight, encouragement, and empathy have 

significantly shaped my own goals as a scholar. I especially thank Wes Sine for his 

incredible attentiveness to my intellectual and professional development and, more 

important, for his desire to be a true friend in every sense of the word. I am grateful to 

friends who, on a day-to-day basis, provided needed encouragement, humor, and 

insight. In particular, I thank Shad Morris, Ben Dunford, Ariel Avgar, Matt Allen, Ed 

Carberry, Shon Hiatt, Marco Hauptmeier, and Sangchan Park. I especially thank my 

office mate of several years, Kelly Patterson, for many “productive” hours of work 

and good times. I am deeply indebted to my parents and siblings for their love and 

ongoing encouragement. I also acknowledge the hard work of Stephen DeGrow, a 

smart and meticulous research assistant. I thank The Community Alliance with Family 

Farmers for providing me the directories that have served as the basis for many of the 

analyses in this dissertation. Many thanks go to the Ewing Marion Kauffman 

Foundation. Their generous funding provided the means for much needed research 

assistance. Finally, I must give most thanks to my wife, Josie, for her boundless love 

and patience. Her contribution to my life and this dissertation is central. I also 

acknowledge the birth and joy of my son, Noah, which brought urgency and clarity to 

the purposes behind this dissertation.  



 

vi 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.........................................................................................iii 
DEDICATION .............................................................................................................. iv 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................. v 
TABLE OF CONTENTS ..............................................................................................vi 
LIST OF FIGURES .....................................................................................................viii 
LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................ ix 

PAPER 1:  FENCES AND GATES:  AN INDUCTIVE CASE STUDY OF 
STANDARDS-BASED CERTIFICATION ORGANIZATIONS IN THE U.S. 
ORGANIC INDUSTRY................................................................................................. 1 

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1 
THE ORGANIC FOOD MOVEMENT AND INDUSTRY GOVERNANCE...... 5 

Local Nonprofit SBCOs ................................................................................... 10 
OCIA ................................................................................................................ 12 
State Certification Organizations ..................................................................... 13 

A TYPOLOGY OF SBCOs.................................................................................. 15 
Dimension 1. Source of Solidarity ................................................................... 16 
Dimension 2. Authority Structure .................................................................... 21 
Dimension 3. Social control/social relations .................................................... 24 
Dimension 4. Incentive structure...................................................................... 26 
Dimension 5. Specialization ............................................................................. 28 

DATA AND METHODS ..................................................................................... 30 
Modeling SBCO Foundings ............................................................................. 34 

RESULTS............................................................................................................. 35 
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION .................................................................. 42 
REFERENCES ..................................................................................................... 46 

PAPER 2:  MECHANISMS GENERATING VARIATION:  REGULATORY 
CHANGE IN THE ORGANIC FOOD INDUSTRY ................................................... 52 

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 52 
THEORY .............................................................................................................. 55 
EMPIRICAL CONTEXT ..................................................................................... 60 
HYPOTHESES..................................................................................................... 64 
DATA AND METHODS ..................................................................................... 71 
RESULTS............................................................................................................. 77 
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION .................................................................. 82 
APPENDIX A:  CODING SHEET FOR ORGANIC FOOD LAWS AND 
AMENDMENTS .................................................................................................. 91 
REFERENCES ..................................................................................................... 96 

PAPER 3:  CERTIFYING THE HARVEST:  THE ROLE OF STANDARDS-BASED 
CERTIFICATION ORGANIZATIONS IN THE ORGANIC FOOD INDUSTRY .. 103 

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 103 



 

vii 

THEORY AND HYPOTHESES........................................................................ 107 
SBCOs and Standards Creation...................................................................... 108 
SBCOs and the Advocacy of Standards ......................................................... 110 
SBCOs and Processes of Verification ............................................................ 111 
Endorsement/Certification.............................................................................. 114 

CONTEXT ......................................................................................................... 116 
DATA AND METHODS ................................................................................... 118 

Dependent Variables ...................................................................................... 120 
Independent Variables .................................................................................... 120 
Control Variables............................................................................................ 121 

ANALYSES ....................................................................................................... 122 
RESULTS........................................................................................................... 124 
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ................................................................ 130 
REFERENCES ................................................................................................... 133 



 

viii 

LIST OF FIGURES 

FIGURE 1.1: CUMULATIVE NUMBER OF SBCOs, 1970–2000 .............................. 9 
FIGURE 1.2: GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNING OF SBCOs, BY FORM..................... 11 
 
FIGURE 2.1: NUMBER OF ORGANIC FOOD LAWS AND AMENDMENTS 

PASSED, 1970–2000 ....................................................................................... 65 
FIGURE 2.2: BOXPLOTS OF SIMILARITY SCORES, BY YEAR ......................... 80 

 



 

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LIST OF TABLES 

TABLE 1.1: IDEAL-TYPICAL DIMENSIONS OF COLLECTIVIST-
DEMOCRATIC AND BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS* ................... 16 

TABLE 1.2: DIMENSIONS OF STANDARDS-BASED CERTIFICATION 
ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS........................................................................ 30 

TABLE 1.3: CORRELATION MATRIX FOR OCIA FORM-FOUNDING 
ANALYSES ..................................................................................................... 37 

TABLE 1.4: CORRELATION MATRIX FOR STATE SBCO  
FORM-FOUNDING ANALYSES................................................................... 38 

TABLE 1.5: CORRELATION MATRIX FOR LOCAL SBCO | 
FORM-FOUNDING ANALYSES................................................................... 39 

TABLE 1.6: LOGISTIC REGRESSION MODELS OF SBCO FORM  
FOUNDING ..................................................................................................... 40 

 
TABLE 2.1: STATES PASSING A LAW AND NO SUBSEQUENT 

AMENDMENTS .............................................................................................. 78 
TABLE 2.2: DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS AND CORRELATIONS FOR 

REGULATORY INERTIA ANALYSIS ......................................................... 83 
TABLE 2.3: DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS AND CORRELATIONS FOR 

REGULATORY ELABORATION ANALYSIS............................................. 84 
TABLE 2.4: REGULATORY INERTIA ANALYSIS, BY STATE  

(GENERALIZED LEAST SQUARES FIXED EFFECTS REGRESSION 
MODELS) ........................................................................................................ 85 

TABLE 2.5: REGULATORY ELABORATION ANALYSIS, COUNT OF 
AMENDMENTS, BY STATE (ZERO-INFLATED NEGATIVE  
BINOMIAL MODELS) ................................................................................... 86 

 
TABLE 3.1: CORRELATIONS FOR MARKET ENTRY........................................ 125 
TABLE 3.2: CORRELATIONS FOR MARKET EXIT ............................................ 126 
TABLE 3.3: NEGATIVE BINOMIAL REGRESSION MODELS OF MARKET 

ENTRY, 1986–2000....................................................................................... 127 
TABLE 3.4: MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ANALYSIS:  ORGANIC FOOD  

MARKET EXIT, 1986–2000 ......................................................................... 128 



 

1 

PAPER 1:  
FENCES AND GATES:  

AN INDUCTIVE CASE STUDY OF STANDARDS-BASED CERTIFICATION 
ORGANIZATIONS IN THE U.S. ORGANIC INDUSTRY 

INTRODUCTION 

Recent theoretical and empirical work underscores the central role that 

audiences1 play in the construction and maintenance of form identity, product 

categories and classification structures (Zuckerman 1999; Pólos, Hannan, and Carroll 

2002; Rao, Monin and Durand 2003, 2005). Organizational scholars argue that the 

identity of a particular organizational form/population “inheres in the expectations, 

assumptions, and beliefs held by agents . . .” and that “ownership of an organization’s 

identity resides within an organization’s audience rather than within the organization 

itself” (Hsu and Hannan 2005:476). These audiences, therefore, wield substantial 

power to influence the fate of organizational populations. For example, Zuckerman 

(1999) demonstrated that firms that are not easily categorized by securities analysts 

into pre-existing industry classifications are viewed as less legitimate and suffer a 

discount reflected in their stock price. Complementing Zuckerman’s study, Hsu (2006) 

shows how the evaluative schemata developed by individual movie critics shape their 

own subsequent decisions regarding the movies they review. As these schemata 

become more coherent, movies belonging to favored genre categories tend to receive 

greater critical attention. Wade, Porac, Pollack, and Griffin (2006) explore similar 

processes associated with Financial World’s ranking of exemplary CEOs. They find 

that while stockholders initially value these rankings (positive abnormal stock returns 

following the announcement of the awards), over time the effects dissipate and 

become negative in succeeding months. CEOs materially benefit from the award yet 
                                                 
1 “Audiences” refer to “collections of agents with an interest in a domain and control over material and 
symbolic resources that affect the success and failure of the claimants in the domain” (Hsu and Hannan 
2005:476). 



 

2 

face heightened expectations about future performance, and CEO compensation 

continues to improve as long as return on equity remains positive. However, if return 

on equity turns negative, compensation for awarded CEOs is lower than for CEOs 

who never won an award for an equivalent level of performance.  

Despite sustained interest in how such third parties impact the fate and 

dynamics of organizational forms, there is scant research on the origins of such 

audiences and the classification structures they employ (but see Bowker and Star 

1999). As Pólos et al. note, “The framework we propose . . . requires simply that such 

codes come into existence and that controllers of valued resources use these codes in 

granting and withholding access to the resources . . . we simply assert that certain 

social codes exist and get enforced, without specifying who does the enforcing and 

how” (2002:95–96, emphasis added).  

To address this theoretical gap, this paper explores the origins and variation of 

standards-based certification organizations (referred to hereafter as SBCOs) in the 

U.S. organic food industry. By SBCO, I mean an organization whose primary purpose 

is to create and promote standards, verify the compliance of other organizations to 

those standards, and formally acknowledge that an organization has met the standards 

through the conferral of a certification, endorsement, or accreditation. Engaging in 

collective action to develop intra-industry standard-setting bodies as a way to establish 

a product’s identity and stabilize exchange is an important strategy for entrepreneurs 

seeking legitimacy for their nascent industry. These bodies “set the bar” and evaluate 

whether or not firms meet that standard. Such accreditation/certification processes are 

central to continued maintenance of well-established fields such as health care (Ruef 

and Scott 1998; Scott et al. 2000), higher education (Zajac and Kraatz 1993; Casile 

and Davis-Blake 2002), nonprofits (Litwack and Hylton 1962; Singh, House, and 

Tucker 1986), and college sports (Stern 1981; Washington 2004). Although there is a 



 

3 

significant amount of research on the legitimation processes of accreditation, there is 

relatively little work that considers the origins of such bodies in nascent markets.  

To uncover key conditions/antecedents and mechanisms that lead to the 

establishment of SBCOs, I employ both qualitative and quantitative evidence to 

develop an inductive case study of the U.S. organic food industry from 1973 to 2000. I 

gathered data on all founding events of organic SBCOs in the United States from 1970 

to 2000. This time frame captures the founding of the first SBCO and tracks all other 

SBCOs founded through 2000, when federal standards dramatically changed the 

market landscape. This context provides a suitable arena to examine the founding and 

evolution of the SBCO as a primary source of industry governance2 over an extended 

time period.  

Using a multi-method approach, I draw on archival data sources and over 20 

interviews with organic growers and SBCO employees (past and present, including 

presidents and directors). Adapting Rothschild and Whitt’s (1986) typology of 

collectivist-democratic and bureaucratic organizations, I first illustrate how SBCOs 

within the organic food industry varied along five key dimensions: source of 

solidarity, authority structure, social control/relations, incentive structure, and 

specialization. After categorizing these various forms of SBCOs, I focus on the 

temporal and geographic patterning of SBCO founding and quantitatively assess what 

types of facilitating conditions predict the founding of each form of SBCO. While a 

substantial body of research has examined temporal variation in broader types of 

industry governance structures and their impact on industry and organizational 

dynamics (Campbell, Hollingsworth, and Lindberg 1991; Ruef and Scott 1998; Scott 

                                                 
2 Governance structures refer to “all those arrangements by which field-level power and authority are 
exercised involving, variously, formal and informal systems, public and private auspices, regulative and 
normative mechanisms” (Scott et al. 2000:172–173). Given the central importance of SBCOs to 
markets and yet the paucity of social science research on their influence on organizational fields (Arhne 
et al. 2000), I bracket my discussion of governance in this paper to SBCOs.  



 

4 

et al. 2000), it has neglected the possibility and implications of spatial variation in 

their emergence and importance. While this work counters institutional determinism 

by emphasizing temporal variation and contingency, there is additional theoretical 

value in exploring the antecedents and facilitating conditions that generate unique 

types of governance organizations in geographically differentiated locales.  

The findings of this paper are consistent with extant research that demonstrates 

how the emergence of new types of economic activity and the infrastructure that 

supports them often require and always benefit from a supportive ideological base 

(Stinchcombe 1965; Aldrich and Fiol 1994; Rao, Morrill, and Zald 2000; Scott et al. 

2000:174; Simons and Ingram 2004). In the context of the U.S. organic food industry, 

early organic growers collectively organized to distinguish organic from ordinary food 

by developing a set of processes and practices of how organic food should be 

cultivated. They collectively acted to codify these practices in standards and 

certification procedures that allowed them to create a “discursive opposition” 

(Campbell 2005:51) to conventional agricultural practices and products by which they 

demarcated a solid jurisdictional boundary around the organic food category. In this 

way, early SBCOs and the standards and certification processes they developed served 

as “fences” differentiating their products from conventionally produced food in the 

marketplace. However, this extensive theorization (Strang and Meyer 1993) and 

subsequent codification led to the diffusion and transposition of the organic concept to 

different locales that became instantiated in a host of unique forms of SBCOs, 

enabling the entry of “movement outsiders” to begin to populate the market and 

engender change among all participants (including incumbents) in the marketplace. In 

this way, SBCOs served as “gates”—providing a means by which outsiders to the 

organic movement could access, participate in, and significantly alter the trajectory of 

the growing market.  



 

5 

This understanding provides insight into questions of endogenous field-level 

change in institutional theory (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006). I find that 

geographically differentiated locales provide seedbeds for the emergence and 

development of unique intra-industry governance arrangements. As these 

arrangements diffuse and are “translated” (Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevon 1996; 

Campbell 2005) to fit local social and institutional contexts, they become sources of 

institutional variation and contestation as spatially dispersed pockets of economic 

activity are knit together through industry growth and consolidation. These processes 

provide insight into how industry-generated governance structures facilitate “market 

incursions into previously protected fields” (e.g., Zelizer 1978; Thornton and Ocasio 

1999; Ahmadjian and Robinson 2001; Lounsbury, Ventresca, and Hirsch 2003), which 

represent a “pressing need for research” (Davis and Marquis 2005:341).  

In the next section, I focus on the development and origins of third-party 

certification organizations in the organic food industry. I then use quantitative data to 

illustrate the factors and antecedents that drive heterogeneity in SBCO organizational 

form. I conclude with a discussion of the various ways that the study of SBCOs can 

expand our understanding of institutional change. 

THE ORGANIC FOOD MOVEMENT AND INDUSTRY GOVERNANCE 

The early North American organic movement built upon earlier food reform 

movements such as the early vegetarian and whole wheat crusades, the pure food 

campaigns, and the back-to-the-land movement.3 Its chief advocate in the United 

States was J. I. Rodale, a publisher-turned-organic farmer. In the early 1940s, Rodale 

purchased a farm in Pennsylvania and, with no experience as a farmer, drew heavily 

on the work of a cohort of scholars and farmers4 who believed that agriculture was 
                                                 
3 See chapter three of Peters 1979 for a review of these movements. 
4 Prominent pioneers of organic agricultural thought and practice and their writings include: F. H. King, 
Farmers for Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, 1911; Rudolph 



 

6 

better understood and practiced through biological and ecological principles. 

Important organic farming practices used and tested by Rodale included green 

manuring, drainage techniques, composting, and soil aeration. These practices were 

grounded in the belief that all waste must return to the soil to replenish necessary 

nutrients and minerals, creating an unbroken chain of health from waste to soil to plant 

to animal to human.  

To advocate organic farming practices more widely, Rodale launched a 

magazine in 1942 called Organic Farming and Gardening. The magazine served as a 

“meeting place” where readers exchanged ideas regarding their organic agriculture 

experiences (Rodale 1942:14). Rodale also founded the Soil and Health Foundation 

(which later became the Rodale Institute), through which he published highly 

influential books that became key sources of information for pioneering organic 

farmers. In his 1948 book, Rodale attempted to formalize the concept of organic 

agriculture by issuing a creed of “organiculturists,” outlining the fundamental 

principles and practices of organic agriculture: 

Organiculturists are: . . . opposed to artificial or chemical fertilizers . . . make 
compost by Sir Albert Howard’s Indore process . . . see soil as a living, 
breathing entity which requires that crops are rotated and that land must lie 
fallow at regulated intervals . . . observe the Law of Return, restoring to the 
soil all plant residues that came from it . . . reject the use of poison sprays in 
orchards and on farm crops . . . are not in favor (at least at this time) of the use 
of human excrement or sewage sludge on food crops . . . and are trusted with 
the sacred trust of producing food that will impart health to the people who 
consume it. As a patriotic duty he assumes the obligation to preserve the 
fertility of the soil, a precious heritage that he must pass on, undefiled and even 
enriched, to subsequent generations. (p. 68)  

Rodale’s early efforts to generate interest and support for organic food were 

largely unsuccessful. In the first year of publication, Rodale’s magazine had only ten 

                                                                                                                                             
Steiner, Agriculture: A Course of Eight Lectures, 1924; Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament, 
1940; and Lady Eve Balfour, The Living Soil, 1943.  



 

7 

subscribers. However, the virtues and value of organic food became increasingly 

salient as broader movements surrounding environmentalism drew the public’s 

attention to the dangers of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals (Carson 1962). 

During the 1960s and 1970s, organic agriculture and its associated practices resonated 

with an increasing audience of gardeners, farmers, and consumers. By 1960, 

subscriptions to Rodale’s publications had risen to 260,000. By 1980, subscriptions to 

Organic Gardening reached above 1,3000,000.  

As interest in organic farming grew, maintaining the integrity of the organic 

concept became paramount for movement farmers and consumers. As a 1972 article in 

Organic Gardening and Farming emphasized, “We’ve all got to raise our voices and 

let the rest of the country know that organic is our word, that it means something to us, 

and that we are going to defend it to the best of our ability” (Rodale 1972:44). In an 

effort to fend off misrepresentation and fraud, initial solutions offered by movement 

insiders included growing the food yourself, buying from a trusted farmer, or 

enquiring about the retailer’s definition of organic and his relationship to the farmer. 

Despite these short-term solutions, Rodale (1971) realized that the development of a 

viable organic market would require a more systematic verification method: 

“Eventually, a foolproof organic certifying procedure will have to be developed, or the 

commercial market for unchemicalized food will not develop” (p. 74).  

In 1971, under Rodale’s supervision, Organic Gardening and Farming (OGF) 

initiated a pilot organic certification program in California. The program consisted of 

obtaining a commitment from each farmer to build or maintain three percent humus 

content in the soil within five years. An organic seal was developed to identify the 

commitment, commodity, and location of the farmer. Soil analyses, residue analyses, 

and personal inspections were also part of the program (Allen 1971:81). The OGF 

certification program grew to include regional groups in twenty states. After two 



 

8 

years, OGF phased out the certification program because it was believed that 

“certification programs are best developed by organic farmers and the people directly 

associated with the distribution and consumption of their harvests, on a grass-roots, 

regional basis” (Foote and Goldstein 1973:89). Rodale’s pilot program was 

discontinued in 1973.  

Following the discontinuation of this program, a myriad of certification 

organizations cropped up across the U.S. during the next thirty years. While 

significant variation existed in these organizations in terms of their geographic scope, 

motivations, organizational structures, target clientele, and procedures, their primary 

functions included the establishment of standards and the certification and verification 

of “organically grown” claims from farmers. This involved extensive paperwork, 

annual and spot inspections, various crop and soil sampling, payment of dues and fees, 

and an agreement to abide by practices and rules set by the certification organization. 

Over time, certification organizations achieved significant normative, extralegal power 

to deal with those growers not measuring up to the standards. That power was 

manifest in SBCOs’ ability to prohibit a certain crop to be sold as certified organic, to 

impose fines, and to decertify a grower not in compliance with the standards and 

required procedures. In these matters, the burden of proof nearly always rested on the 

suspected grower (Guthman 2004). As such, SBCOs clearly retained substantial power 

not only in defining the parameters of what organic included, but also in determining 

who could actively be a player in the emerging market.  

Early standards creation and certification efforts in the 1970s were organized 

around local nonprofits that primarily represented the interests of small, organic 

farmers (whose products and anticapitalist ideologies were largely ignored by 

mainstream agribusiness). As the organic food market grew in the 1980s, the Organic 

Crops Improvement Association (OCIA) entered the certification field by developing 



 

9 

an international, federated structure that facilitated the entrance of larger farms and 

agribusiness interests into the emerging market. Finally, in the mid-1980s (and 

particularly in the early 1990s), state governments established their own certification 

agencies, and private certification organizations began to populate the field.5 The 

emergence and growth of SBCOs in the U.S. organic food industry exhibited fairly 

distinct temporal and spatial patterning. Figure 1.1 shows the temporal emergence of 

SBCOs in the U.S. organic food industry from 1970 to 2000 and Figure 1.2 shows 

their spatial emergence.  

 

FIGURE 1.1: CUMULATIVE NUMBER OF SBCOs, 1970–2000 

                                                 
5 Information on private certification organizations was not readily forthcoming, and although they 
captured much of the certification market (particularly the certifier Quality Assurance International), 
data were not available on the states in which these for-profit certifiers operated. Furthermore, during 
the study period, only six for-profit certification organizations populated the field, making statistical 
analysis difficult.  

0 

5 

10 

15 

20 

25 

30 

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
Year

N
um

be
r 

of
 S

B
C

O
s 

State SBCO Local SBCO OCIA 



 

10 

In the remainder of this section, I draw upon interviews and historical archival 

data sources to describe these three categories of certification organizations.  

Local Nonprofit SBCOs 

By local nonprofits, I refer to SBCOs that were incorporated as nonprofit 

organizations at the intrastate level and were formed by local organic growers. These 

organizations almost exclusively certified growers within their state of founding 

(although some in later years of the industry began to certify beyond the borders of 

their founding state). Following the termination of the OGF program, the California 

Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) became the first organization to independently 

certify growers. In the first newsletter published by CCOF (1974), the founders of the 

organization wrote,  

We feel that the primary purpose of our organization is to rid the organic food 
industry of the phonies. As an organization and as individuals, we are 
dedicated to this purpose. By offering to the public organically grown food that 
has been certified by our organization, we feel that in due time all consumers 
will be able to walk into health food or natural food stores and be certain that 
he is buying organically grown food which it is so labeled. Our individual 
dedication to this organization is not for personal profit or glory, but merely for 
the protection of the consumer and the honest members of this industry. To this 
cause we have all devoted much time, effort and money and for this cause we 
will continue. (p. 2)  

After the creation of CCOF, nonprofit certification organizations formed from 

local networks of farmers throughout the United States. As shown in Figure 1.2, all 

certification organizations in the United States before 1985 were local nonprofits. The 

earliest certification organizations appeared in California, Oregon, Maine, New 

Hampshire, Vermont, Michigan, and Minnesota. Over time, more local nonprofits 

were founded throughout the Northeast, primarily along the eastern seaboard and then 

moving south and west.  



 

11 

 
1980 

 
 

 
1990 

 
 

 
 
 
 

2000 
 

LEGEND 
 

 No SBCO   Local SBCO 
 OCIA Chapter    State SBCO 

 

FIGURE 1.2: GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNING OF SBCOs, BY FORM   



 

12 

Local nonprofit SBCOs absorbed much of the risk and costs associated with 

experimentation and illegitimacy in the early moments of the industry. Their 

collectivist ideals served as a sustaining motivation in the face of limited economic 

benefit accruing to early growers. These local nonprofit SBCOs were institutional 

entrepreneurs that established the identity, legitimacy, and accountability of the 

organic industry, guaranteed the quality and value of its products and services, and 

increased the integrity and reliability of growers. They accomplished this through the 

creation of a set of standards and verification procedures that subsequently diffused 

and were transposed in other locales by a variety of actors.  

OCIA 

Although founding generation members of social movement organizations may 

be attached to a broader social movement and its ideology, second generation 

members often tend to be oriented more toward the goals and services of only a 

particular organization, rather than those of the movement at large (Rothschild and 

Whitt 1986). In a similar fashion, a “second generation” form of SBCO exhibited 

marked differences from its early local nonprofit predecessors. In 1985, the Organic 

Crop Improvement Association (OCIA) grew out of Organic Farms, Inc., a wholesale 

distributor in Beltsville, Maryland, that sought a summer source of fresh vegetables 

that could not be grown in the South. To this end, OCIA established two pilot 

programs, one in Vermont and one in Quebec. As part of the programs, OCIA 

demanded certification from growers, funding their participation for the first year with 

the understanding that growers would then take responsibility to run the program 

thereafter. OCIA was to then serve as an accreditation body over these and all other 

existing certification programs, including local nonprofits. However, local nonprofits 

declined the proposition in order to maintain control over their own standards and 

certification processes.  



 

13 

Although the program stalled in Vermont (for reasons that will be explicated in 

more detail below) the program caught on in Quebec and then spread to Ontario. By 

1986, OCIA had 35 members (CAAP 1986). Shortly thereafter, OCIA grew 

significantly, establishing chapters and affiliates throughout various parts of the 

United States and Canada, focusing on serving international markets for certified 

organic food primarily in Europe and Japan. By 1989, OCIA had established chapters 

in 11 states and boasted a membership in North, Central, and South America of over 

6,000 producers. In the United States, OCIA established a strong presence in Illinois, 

Indiana, and Nebraska, and then fortified its influence and presence in other 

Midwestern states. By 2000, OCIA had 35 chapters in 16 states. Much of the later 

growth of the organization came from the founding of multiple chapters in the same 

state.6 

State Certification Organizations 

Beginning in 1985, state bureaucracies forayed into organic certification. In 

1985, Washington state lawmakers gave the director of the Department of Agriculture 

the prerogative to create and modify a materials list7 and to be responsible for the 

enforcement of the law. This was the most power given to a state department of 

agriculture to this point in the industry. Exercising that power in 1986, the Washington 

Department of Agriculture created the first state-run certification organization in the 

United States, a move that subsequent state departments of agriculture would follow, 

beginning with Texas. Public pressure and the recognition of the potential revenue for 

the state played important roles in initiating these two states’ involvement in the 

organic food market.  

                                                 
6 The majority of OCIA-dominated states had multiple chapters (11 out of 16). 
7 A materials list refers to materials listed as either allowed, restricted, or prohibited in the production, 
processing, and handling of organic food.  



 

14 

The Washington program materialized as a result of grassroots efforts by the 

grower-run Tilth Producer’s Cooperative (TPC) that previously certified organic 

producers. In 1985 this group, along with a local five-store retail consumers’ 

cooperative, began pushing for an organic food law. Two years later, additional 

legislation mandated the establishment of a certification program under the 

Washington Department of Agriculture (Friedman and Fishman 1989). 

In contrast to Washington, whose legislation was driven by industry 

participants, the Texas Department of Agriculture was proactive, taking the initiative 

to establish a state organic program. To determine the potential of the organic food 

market, the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) conducted a survey and found 

that there existed a potential $35 million organic market in Texas, with 90 percent of 

the products coming from California. To capture some of that market, the TDA 

implemented a comprehensive certification program to encourage Texas producers to 

farm organically in order to supply their own state’s demand for such products. The 

Texas legislature approved $45,000 for the development of the program, which served 

as a model for other state programs (Friedman and Fishman 1989). 

The efforts of the Washington and Texas Departments of Agriculture set the 

stage for other states to take a proactive role in the industry. As shown in Figure 1.1, 

state agencies did not get involved in certification until 1986—long after local 

nonprofit SBCOs had laid the groundwork by developing standards, providing models 

of how to organize, and establishing markets. After the initial founding of the first 

state-sponsored certification organizations in Washington and Texas, a spate of other 

state organization foundings occurred. By 1993, 8 additional states had established 

state certification organizations. By 2000, that number reached 14.  

The geographic pattern of state certification foundings shows that most state 

certification organizations were founded primarily in the Rocky Mountain States, the 



 

15 

Southwest, and the South Central states of Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. Figure 

1.2 shows that state certification organizations were largely founded in states that had 

neither local nonprofit nor OCIA chapters. 

A TYPOLOGY OF SBCOs 

Although each of the three forms of certification organizations discussed above 

performed the same functions of setting industry standards and verifying compliance 

to those standards, they varied in important ways. This variance and its relationship to 

the temporal and spatial history of the industry is theoretically significant because the 

geographic and temporal patterning indicates the way in which SBCOs first served as 

jurisdictional “fences” but then later and in different geographic locations served as 

“gates” by which growers distinct from those pioneering the industry entered the 

industry.  

To develop the distinctions between SBCO forms, I adapt Rothschild and 

Whitt’s (1986) typology of ideal types of bureaucratic and collectivist-democratic 

organizations to highlight five important dimensions (source of solidarity, authority 

structure, social control/relations, incentive structure, and specialization) along which 

differences in these forms can be identified. Table 1.1 outlines and describes these 

dimensions. As the foregoing analysis of these dimensions illustrates, the three major 

categories of SBCOs in the organic food industry (local nonprofit, OCIA, and state-

level certifiers) adhere roughly to a continuum in which the ideal types of bureaucratic 

and collectivist-democratic are at each end. It should be emphasized that this typology 

is a continuum, given that few organizations completely embody purely bureaucratic 

or collectivist-democratic ideals. What follows is a narrative analysis of each of the 

five dimensions as they apply to the three major categories of SBCOs in the organic 

food industry. These dimensions then offer a point of departure for examining the 

conditions that predict the presence of one form of SBCO over another. 



 

16 

TABLE 1.1: IDEAL-TYPICAL DIMENSIONS OF COLLECTIVIST-
DEMOCRATIC AND BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS* 

Dimensions Collectivist-democratic Bureaucratic 

Source of Solidarity Ideological; strength contingent 
upon the number and intensity 
of adherents to ideology  

 

Self interest; strength of 
solidarity contingent upon 
shared material interests 

Authority Structure Resides in the collectivity as a 
whole; rules are minimized and 
developed by democratic means 

 

Resides in individuals by virtue 
of their incumbency in office 
and/or expertise; universal, 
fixed rules are developed and 
implemented by office 
incumbents 

Social Control/Relations Social control based on 
personalistic and/or moral 
appeals 

 

Concept of community is 
paramount. Relations are 
personal and intrinsically 
valuable 

Social control achieved through 
supervision, standardized rules 
and sanctions  

 

Concept of impersonality is 
paramount. Relations are role 
based and instrumental 

Incentive Structure Normative and solidarity 
incentives prevail over material 
incentives  

Remunerative incentives prevail 
over norms and solidarity 

Specialization  Functions are generalized and 
organization often provides 
additional services beyond its 
officially stated purpose 

Functions are specialized and 
segmented  

* Adapted from Rothschild and Whitt 1986 

Dimension 1. Source of Solidarity  

For many industry pioneers, participation in the early organic movement was 

largely predicated upon ideological grounds. The source of solidarity for these 

participants was a set of shared ideals-turned-practices, many of which were part and 

parcel of larger countercultural movements of the time.  

Many of the “political” enthusiasts were hangers-on from the 1960s, initially 
student, civil-rights, and environmental activists, turned now to the land. These 
enthusiasts frequently thought of themselves as organizers, bent on mobilizing 



 

17 

the organic movement to a new political self-consciousness . . . These 
advocates were articulate in other visions of the movement, including 
anarchist, Marxist, communal, and decentralist ideals. This “politics”, vaguely 
stated, left many questions unanswered, but it created a distinct identity for 
many enthusiasts. (Peters 1979:12) 

One industry insider describes the countercultural landscape of the time as 

follows: 

What else was happening back in the early mid 70s? The back-to-the-land 
movement. So you had a lot of communes. You had a lot of people that were 
militantly opposed to capitalism who were trying to set up an alternative 
production and distribution system, not necessarily Marxist, but not necessarily 
pursuing profit either. They were trying to figure out how to fulfill a higher 
objective. Paramount among them was the Sunburst Commune in Santa 
Barbara County. Amigo Bob came out of that. A whole lot of people who are 
still in organic farming today, got started on communes. And were trying to 
figure out ways to keep organic food moving without having to deal with the 
Man. That is really hard to explain to people about what that meant for 
organizational stability and accountability and all that. (Interview, June 20, 
2006) 

The “‘politics’, vaguely stated” and “the higher objective” mentioned in these 

quotes refer to the primary source of solidarity for early movement actors. Based on a 

critique of mainstream systems of production, distribution, and consumption, the 

ideological impetus for the organic food movement was a commitment to all-

encompassing economic, social, and ecological ideals. An early industry publication 

articulates these ideals as follows:    

The wheel on the back cover . . . depicts a wholistic alternative to a corporate 
industrial food system. Though it might be argued that food is food regardless 
of the system by which it is produced, the differences between the 
commercially and ecologically accountable systems to food and agriculture are 
major. Differences in motivation, rationale and worldview manifest themselves 
in the way land and people are mobilized, how food is produced and how foods 
are distributed and ultimately utilized. By definition, the corporate industrial 
food system is profit motivated. This places a priority on immediate results and 
accountability measured in terms of economic gains. What follows is a stress 
on maximum yield stimulated by intensive use of capital and technology 



 

18 

accompanied by exploitation of energy and displacement of people. Though 
considerations for conservation, ecology and social implications are best 
alluded to, they are secondary and rhetorical at best. In contrast, a system of 
food and agriculture motivated more by ecological and social considerations 
over profit accountability is based on a different set of assumptions which 
expresses itself in stressing optimum over maximum yields; techniques that 
value human and biological inputs over technological ones; energy 
conservation over energy exploitation; methods that are labor intensive more 
than capital intensive, especially where the later is limited and former is 
abundant. On the time scale, the concern is with posterity as well as immediate 
gains. The implications of such contrasting regard for resources, people and 
food command serious attention. (Fujimoto 1976:v) 

As the earliest certifiers in the industry, composed primarily of industry 

pioneers, local nonprofit SBCOs shared the ideological source of solidarity of the 

early movement at large. Seeking to protect their ideals and the products they 

embodied, local nonprofits formed to promote and endorse conceptions of “organic” 

that were consistent with early movement trends. In emotive, dogmatic language, 

CCOF, the first local nonprofit SBCO, clearly alluded to its ideological roots in its 

first newsletter.  

. . . more and more energy and dollars are spent every year in devitalizing, 
refining, and generally rendering useless and sometimes dangerous the food 
the world so desperately needs. This same sort of “wisdom” takes our most 
precious resource—the soil, and violates and rapes it in every way possible. It 
turns this source of life both literally and figuratively into concrete and sees to 
it that fewer and fewer people have access to it . . . To re-make our lives with 
unprocessed and organically grown foods is no longer a fad or life style, it’s 
becoming a necessity. The more people that we can expose to these foods, the 
better their lives will become, and the better chance we will all have for 
survival. In many ways it’s a dark picture, but at the same time it’s the most 
exciting challenge we have yet to face. (Hillyard 1974:14) 



 

19 

While the motivations of individual members varied,8 local nonprofits that followed 

continued to found largely on the ideological groundwork of movement pioneers such 

as CCOF.  

In contrast to local nonprofits, OCIA members’ participation in the organic 

industry was unequivocally rooted in market-related concerns. Many of the OCIA 

farmers I interviewed suggested that their transition from conventional to organic 

agriculture was driven by economic necessity/opportunity. One farmer in Montana 

reported,  “I wouldn’t be farming today if it weren’t for organics . . . I got into 

organics because I was broke and had a lot of new land that was virgin sod . . . I got 

into it purely because of economics” (Interview, May 22, 2003). Another OCIA-

certified farmer from Iowa reported that her transition to organic was simply a 

consequence of trying to cut costs as interest rates escalated during the late 1980s. To 

save money, she began to reduce the amount of chemicals she used on the land. This 

slow reduction allowed her to eventually transition into organic farming, which 

ultimately prevented her farm from going bankrupt. This motivation was echoed by a 

farmer in Ontario who stated, “I don’t think we were taking advantage of a consumer 

                                                 
8 A recent critique of the literature that examines growers’ motivations for practicing organic agriculture 
suggests that the organic/conventional divide that casts organic farmers as purely ideological and 
conventional farmers driven only by economic profit is a false dualism (Guthman 2004). Guthman 
argues that the dichotomy neglects how motivations shift as a result of individual agronomic and 
financial success and/or broader changes in the growth of the organic market. Nonetheless, it is 
undisputed that farmers that entered agriculture as organic farmers indeed identify very strongly with 
the idea that organic agriculture is a countercultural ideology. It is also generally true that smaller 
growers more closely identify with social movement ideals, whereas larger farms are (or were) nearly 
always operate under a more business-oriented logic (Guthman 2004). With regard to local nonprofits 
and their founders, I find a similar phenomenon: those that founded these organizations tended to be 
much more committed to the idealism underpinning organic agriculture than were other types of 
certification organizations. However, it is naïve to think that local nonprofit SBCOs did not permit 
farmers to be certified who were driven primarily by economic motivations. For example, one 
informant, in describing the membership motivations of the local nonprofit SBCO that she was involved 
with, suggested that there was “a mix between people who got into it because of 
philosophical/ideological reasons and people who were really practical, business oriented; there wasn’t 
a surfeit of business-oriented people, but some of them became that way when they realized that was 
the only way it was gonna work, you know what I mean? [laughing]” (Interview, June 28, 2006).  



 

20 

that was interested in organics. We were trying to recover more of our costs of 

production by not using chemicals” (Interview, June 16, 2005).  

OCIA farmers not only certified to address cost issues of production, they also 

wanted to satisfy the demands of downstream buyers and wholesalers in the value 

chain. A Kansas grain grower explained that he initially resisted certification because 

he did not want to have to deal with the bureaucracy. He noted, “Back in the day, it 

was just a phone call and an affidavit. This was all that certification consisted of” 

(Interview, May 28, 2003). However, he finally decided to certify in 1984 when he 

sent a millet crop to Arkansas, where it was not accepted. It was at that point he 

decided to become certified. Similarly, an Ontario farmer recounted that growers in 

his OCIA chapter and those in the Saskatchewan chapter came to third-party 

certification by necessity: “Their customers in Europe needed some guarantee that 

some kinds of standards were being used in certification. From Saskatchewan, a lot of 

wheat was going to Europe. They got involved in OCIA because of marketing 

opportunities . . . their market dictated to them that they had to do that” (Interview, 

June 16, 2005). He further noted, “I think their market was dictating to them to have a 

third-party certification more so than the farmers themselves were” (Interview, June 

16, 2005).  

As quotes from OCIA farmers indicate, the market-driven necessities of 

conventional farmers at the time allowed OCIA leadership to draw on a clear-cut 

economic source of solidarity to establish and promote their certification efforts. As 

one farmer puts it, the transition from conventional to organic farming was made 

easier because the OCIA representative “was really a salesman. He got people 

enthused and farmers had heard that organic oats were a good deal” (Interview, June 

10, 2003). The ideological source of solidarity that was so evident in local nonprofit 

certification, and the organic movement at large, was conspicuously diminished for 



 

21 

OCIA and its “conventional, run-of-the-mill farmers” (Interview, June 16, 2005), as 

one informant called them. The contrasting sources of solidarity were described by an 

OCIA farmer: “I started going to the Anaheim food show in ’92 and that was a trip—

that was a trip. The people in that show, I mean, I had never seen these kind of weird 

people in my life, really in my life—it was something.” When asked if OCIA had 

“weird people” in their ranks, she said, “Some, but very few. Most came from people 

who were just about to lose their farms and this [organic farming] was something that 

will maybe work . . . and I know people that it has saved their farm (Interview, July 

23, 2004). 

In contrast to local nonprofit SBCOs and OCIA, each of which had clearly 

evidenced sources of solidarity, state SBCOs embodied more of the ideal bureaucratic 

organization. According to Weber (1978), modern bureaucracy is established on the 

basis of rational-legal authority. Consistent with Weber’s conception of bureaucracy, 

state SBCOs exhibited ideal-typical characteristics such as rule and role formalization, 

impersonal and instrumental relations, valorization of remunerative incentives, and 

advancement based on achievement. These bureaucratic elements obviated the need 

for other sources of solidarity (ideological, regional, etc.) for the continued 

maintenance of state SBCOs; they had the institutional mandate and financial backing 

of the respective state governments.  

Dimension 2. Authority Structure  

Rothschild and Whitt note that the “collectivist-democratic organization rejects 

bureaucratic justifications for authority. Here authority rests not with the 

individual . . . but resides in the collectivity . . . collectives seek not the transference of 

power from one official to another, but the abolition of the pyramid in toto: 

organization without hierarchy” (1986:51). Although local nonprofit SBCOs were not 

as opposed to organizational hierarchy as the ideal-typical collectivist organization, 



 

22 

they exhibited a clear preference for and commitment to decentralized and democratic 

decision-making. For example, one of the founders of the Northeast Organic Farmers 

Association of Vermont, a local nonprofit, described the organization’s process for 

writing standards: “We had a committee and we drafted some standards and extracted 

some comments and feedback from people and it went on a few rounds and then we 

agreed upon it. We had a pretty strong commitment to a democratic, open process” 

(Interview, June 28, 2006). Commenting on the structure of authority in the California 

Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), Guthman (2004) states, “There was a strong 

countercultural element within CCOF and among nonaffiliated organic growers as 

well, evidenced in the idiom they used in reference to their annual meetings: ‘tribal 

gatherings.’ This idiom was barrier enough to other, less countercultural growers for a 

long time. In addition, the original CCOF growers were notably resistant to formality; 

it was not until the late 1980s that CCOF received proper tax status from the Internal 

Revenue Service and filed its first tax returns” (p. 112).9 CCOF strove to have 

members vote and control the establishment of standards and direction of the 

organization. A former employee of two local nonprofit SBCOs stated that all early 

certification organizations had a very similar commitment to decentralized and 

democratic decision-making processes (Interview, June 20, 2006).  

In contrast to the organizational structure of local nonprofit SBCOs that 

preserved collective decision making as much as possible, as an international certifier, 

OCIA established chapters in multiple states that had six or more members and then 

appointed unpaid chapter presidents to be responsible for completing all of the 

paperwork associated with certification and inspection for each farmer. OCIA 

members were actively recruited to join chapters, and OCIA would establish a chapter 

                                                 
9 Nonetheless, they did see the need for some structure: “While it is possible for short-lived groups to 
operate without defined levels of authority, all organizations that intend on being around for a while 
must set down their delineation of authority” (Cain 1984:4). 



 

23 

only if a minimum number of farmers would certify. While the chapters completed all 

of the paperwork and conducted inspections, decisions about standards were made by 

the international body. One of the founders describes his justification for a federated 

structure:  

. . . one of the things I noticed was that everyone was developing their own 
standards and my idea was to have a standard that was universal across the 
country . . . My idea was to take the chapters and form an international body 
where all of the chapters belonged and everyone worked on the same 
standards. We met in Albany [New York] and there was quite a number of 
different groups represented there. [all OCIA groups—it was very loose at that 
time]. We agreed to work on one set of standards and we left that meeting with 
an international body to take care of standards. (Interview, June 16, 2005) 

This approach was not amenable to the participants in the OCIA pilot program in 

Vermont. The director of the program at that time noted,  

OCIA was in VT for only year or two. I mean mostly people were very 
suspicious, it began to seem like something that wasn’t what was advertised as 
and the growers weren’t having the control that they were promised. They 
didn’t want to pay the cost of affiliating with this national thing, they didn’t 
have an interest in national markets, so they decided to turn it into, I think at 
that point it was turned into the name, Vermont Organic Farmers which is what 
it still is. (Interview, June 28, 2006) 

Similar disillusionment occurred at a much later date in Montana. Before 1999, 

Montana growers were certified largely by OCIA. In an effort to gain local control, a 

group of farmers sought to develop a state certification program. The legislature gave 

seed money for an investigation of the certification process. They polled all organic 

growers in the state, and more than 60 percent of the growers wanted a state-run 

certification program. The program was put in place in 2001. 

In the case of state SBCOs, all authority to make decisions resided with the 

department and the various individuals responsible for administering the program 

(generally the state department of agriculture). Nonetheless, state SBCOs generally 



 

24 

had an advisory board constituted of department employees, organic producers, 

consumers, and cooperative extension employees. These boards assisted the director 

of the program in formulating and carrying out the state organic program. 

Nonetheless, there were clear delineations of authority, and that authority resided with 

individuals by virtue of their incumbency in office (Weber 1978; Rothschild and Whitt 

1986).  

Dimension 3. Social control/social relations 

Generally speaking, collectivist organizations tend to shun the use of 

centralized authority or standardized rules to achieve social control. Rather, they rely 

on personalistic and moralistic appeals to achieve social control (Rothschild and Whitt 

1986). Inherent in the functional purpose of SBCOs is to monitor and verify the degree 

of compliance by organizations that subscribe to their standards. Consequently, 

SBCOs rely on some supervision, standardized rules, and procedures to legitimately 

claim to achieve their purposes. Nonetheless, the degree to which social control in 

certification occurred via social relations (personalistic/moralistic) versus impersonal 

and impartial third-party verification varied by SBCO form. For instance, certification 

of farms by early local nonprofit SBCOs occurred through what one informant called 

“the buddy system.” This referred to the practice of organic growers certifying one 

another—no truly impartial third party was doing the monitoring. He stated that most 

early certification was done “largely by the buddy system. And it remained by the 

buddy system until I was hired [1987]. Not that there was anything wrong with it. I 

mean, seriously the buddy system was an economic way of market enforcement that 

required accountability and responsibility on a very personal basis. You had your 

peers, competitors and neighbors checking you out” (Interview, June 20, 2006). When 

asked whether it was successful and whether farmers lived up to the standards, he said, 



 

25 

“It depends on who you ask and if you are asking me, the situation was adequate up 

until a certain point” (Interview, June 20, 2006). 

By virtue of being an internationally federated organization with multiple 

chapters in multiple locales, OCIA naturally relied on more centralized authority and 

standardized rules to achieve social control. However, while OCIA centralized much 

of the decision-making regarding the creation and modification of standards, it was 

fairly decentralized in other ways. Consequently, there were wide disparities in the 

running of many of the chapters (Guthman 2004). One of the founders of OCIA 

recounted the state of affairs in the organization’s early days:  

. . . I got interested in the third-party thing by being questioned in the 
marketplace and knowing that we had to have standards. In the early days, 
there wasn’t anything organized, and so we organized our own standard based 
on European standards, IFOAM standards, basically. And . . . I would do a lot 
of my own inspections. (Interview, June 16, 2005) 

An informant who worked for OCIA suggested that because certification decisions 

were made locally, the door was opened for opportunism and fraudulent practices in 

OCIA chapters:   

. . . decisions about things like the standards were set up to be more national, to 
be done for the whole system. But the certification decisions were made 
locally. I don’t have any first-hand information about this, but I have certainly 
heard enough stories about the cronies club in the local areas tolerating some 
shady things. (Interview, June 28, 2006) 

Documentation of OCIA’s activities in California revealed similar issues. In the 1990s 

in California, OCIA for a time had growers directly paying the inspectors of their 

farms. Additional internal controversies involving allegations of improper certification 

practices led to the disbarment of the California chapter. Furthermore, OCIA was 

implicated in a 1995 suit that named OCIA and QAI (a private certifier) as having 



 

26 

certified fungicide-treated bananas (Guthman 2004). OCIA, like local nonprofits, were 

engaging in “buddy system”-like tactics but became mired in controversy.  

Social relations in OCIA were ostensibly characterized much more by 

impersonality and instrumentality and a disinterest in community building than were 

social relations among local nonprofit certifiers’ growers. One of the founders of 

OCIA noted that OCIA farmers were “an independent lot,” and a past president, 

commenting on the willingness of OCIA members to lobby for legislation, noted that 

“Most of them [the farmers] said, ‘I just want to farm my fields’” (Interview, July 23, 

2004).  

Social control, particularly in the context of certification, differed significantly 

for state SBCOs relative to local nonprofit SBCOs and OCIA. By virtue of being run 

by the state, state SBCOs brought added credibility and objectivity to verification and 

certification processes through impersonal, impartial, and standardized third-party 

verification. For example, the Texas program redressed “some of the more difficult 

issues that have been plaguing the organic industry for years ” by ensuring objective 

third-party certification through hiring independent inspectors, implementing a 

pesticide residue testing program, clarifying farm questionnaires, and bolstering its 

materials list (Friedman and Fishman 1989:135). 

Dimension 4. Incentive structure  

Instead of relying on remunerative incentives, collectivist organizations depend 

on a sense of shared purpose and relational ties to generate commitment to the 

organization (Etzioni 1961; Zald and Ash 1966; Kanter 1968; Rothschild and Whitt 

1986). Local nonprofit SBCOs relied heavily on work that was accomplished through 

underpaid and, more often, volunteer labor. One of the first paid employees for a local 

nonprofit SBCO recalled a conversation with one of the founders of the SBCO:  



 

27 

I had the good fortune of speaking with __ __ before he passed on. And __ was 
many things, but he was a person who was definitely a partisan for a 
decentralized farmer-based system. To his dying day, true to his word, I mean 
he had nothing against me personally, but he thought I was an absolute parasite 
for taking a salary based on taxing farmers. You know, “death to the 
bureaucrats who prey on the lives of the peasants.” And that perspective 
persisted. You know what, [this organization], through its volunteer structure, 
and through its dedication, survived. (Interview, June 20, 2006) 

He further commented on the work of one of the early presidents of the SBCO:  

Still, __ maintained the organization. He did the minimum that was needed to 
keep it afloat. Many people said he did more than the minimum needed. 
Without compensation, he put in a tremendous amount of time and kept it 
alive . . . with [this organization] it was a labor of love. (Interview, June 20, 
2006) 

Like its local nonprofit counterparts, OCIA was initially established using a set 

of volunteers to accomplish the work of certifying all farms. At the local level, OCIA 

would appoint an unpaid chapter president who was responsible for completing all of 

the paperwork for each farmer in the chapter. A past director of OCIA reported that 

the system did not work because “those were volunteer positions and you can’t get 

people to continually volunteer and it always ends up with one person doing all the 

work. People have to want to do that and understand that they have to contribute and 

that it’s work” (Interview, July 23, 2004). The use of volunteers in OCIA was a 

concern from the beginning, according to one of the founders:  

. . . being a membership organization, one of the drawbacks was that everyone 
wanted to belong to the organization and get their work done for near nothing. 
But we didn’t have the funding to pay all the people that were doing the work 
to get the applications ready and doing the actually reviewing and end up 
giving the certification. So everything was volunteer and the people that were 
good at it soon got burned out and they weren’t being rewarded. The 
organization with that system was not working very well in my opinion and 
soon, me and several other guys decided to start a new group that was a fee for 
service. If someone wanted to be certified, you were a client rather than a 
member. We went down that road. OCIA disappeared in Ontario for some of 
the reasons that I mentioned. There was nothing wrong with their standards or 



 

28 

their actual certification. It’s just the organization just couldn’t survive under 
that model of volunteer help. (Interview, June 16, 2005) 

These quotes suggest that from the very beginning, OCIA was unable to 

function using a volunteer system to accomplish its goals because such a structure was 

not conducive to the members it was meant to serve. As noted, one of the founders of 

OCIA broke away and started a group that relied on a bureaucratic structure that 

treated those seeking certification as “clients” rather than “members.” 

State SBCOs obviously did not draw on normative and solidarity incentives to 

ensure that employees performed their expected activities and tasks. While employees 

of state SBCOs were often sympathetic to the ideals espoused by many of those in the 

local nonprofit SBCOs, their organization did not have to rely on their employees’ 

commitment to the ideal to ensure continued functioning of the organization. 

Receiving a salary also had the effect of increasing continuity in personnel as they 

were adequately compensated for their work.  

Dimension 5. Specialization 

Many local nonprofit SBCOs engaged in a variety of tasks beyond the core 

function of certification such as public relations (direct personal contact, booths at 

fairs, slide shows, developing educational packages for distributors and retailers, etc.), 

information sharing through monthly newsletters, conferences/workshops, marketing 

efforts, and political lobbying. In the absence of substantial support from university 

extension services and other traditional sources of agricultural information and 

assistance (Lipson 1997), these organizations used their ideological source of 

solidarity to be both repositories and disseminators of expertise of organic production 

practices. 

The degree to which OCIA engaged in ancillary functions such as educational 

outreach, information sharing, and political lobbying was eclipsed by growers’ sole 



 

29 

interest in certification. One of the founders of OCIA disappointedly recounts, “The 

OCIA concept was, Organic Crop Improvement Association. [The purpose] was to 

certify crops and improve crops. This concept was lost at day one. People came to the 

organization to become certified, not to improve crops. It was really driven by 

economics” (Interview, June 16, 2005). As such, OCIA was essentially an 

organization whose core specialization was certification. Based on interviews 

conducted, OCIA did not engage in any additional services, advocacy, or community-

awareness efforts.  

Consistent with the aims of state SBCOs to eliminate conflicts of interest 

(growers certifying growers), the state was only in the business of certification. 

Among local nonprofit SBCOs, technical assistance to farmers often went hand-in-

hand with certification. By contrast, state SBCOs were valued in the industry for their 

potential to be more objective, credible, and less prone to personal distortions. 

Table 1.2 summarizes the three forms of SBCOs, arraying them on a 

continuum from more collectivist in nature to more bureaucratic. Local nonprofit 

SBCOs are more collectivist in nature, OCIA chapters tend to fall in the middle, and 

state-run SBCOs are more bureaucratic. Having inductively developed this typology 

of SBCOs in the U.S. organic food industry from interviews and other sources of 

qualitative data, I now shift attention to questions of conditions that supported the 

presence of the various forms of SBCOs.  

As mentioned in the introduction, given that increasing attention is being paid 

to the role of audiences (i.e., critics, industry analysts, certification/accreditation 

bodies, etc.) in facilitating the emergence of particular organizational forms and 

markets, it is important to understand the origins of these audiences. Theory regarding 

the founding of organizations (Stinchcombe 1965) and the insights gained from the 

case study suggest that particular antecedent and facilitative conditions will tend to 



 

30 

foster distinct forms of SBCOs. This quantitative analysis is an effort to validate those 

claims derived from the inductive case study of SBCOs.  

TABLE 1.2: DIMENSIONS OF STANDARDS-BASED CERTIFICATION 
ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS 

 More Collectivist  More Bureaucratic 
  
 Local SBCO OCIA  State SBCO 
Dimensions    
    

Source of Solidarity Primarily Ideological Primarily 
Economic 

N/A 

Authority Structure Decentralized 
authority;  

democratic decision 
making on standards 

Centralized 
authority; 

decision making 
regarding 
standards done 
at headquarters 

All decisions 
regarding standards 
made by legislature 
and state departments 
of agriculture; often 
employed an advisory 
board 

Social Control/Relations Growers certify 
growers 

Growers certify 
growers 

Objective and reliable 
third party 
certification  

Incentive Structure Reliance on shared 
purpose and 
volunteer labor to 
accomplish 
organizational tasks 
and goals 

Little shared 
purpose; 
consequently, 
the use of 
volunteer labor 
was not 
sustainable 

Remunerative 
incentives  

Specialization and 
Organizational Focus 

Performed many 
tasks and functions 
beyond its stated 
purpose of 
certification  

Primary focus 
on certification 

Only performed 
certification functions 
to maintain objectivity 
and credibility 

 

Given the ideological nature of local nonprofit SBCOs, I expect that states that 

are more amenable to collectivist-democratic ideals and to anti-mass consumer and 

anti-capitalist ideas will be more likely to experience the founding of a local nonprofit 

SBCO. I would also predict that states with established organic food industry 

infrastructure would also be more likely to experience local nonprofit SBCO founding. 



 

31 

Based on the findings from the qualitative component of this research, it is reasonable 

to expect that OCIA chapters are more likely to be founded in states with larger 

agribusiness interests. Finally, given state SBCOs’ bureaucratic nature and their 

reliance on the state for financial and institutional support, it stands to reason that 

greater legal and regulatory infrastructure would be a precursor to their creation. 

Hence, I expect that states that pass more comprehensive state organic policies and 

regulation will be more likely to establish a state SBCO. 

DATA AND METHODS 

Because I focus on the differential conditions that facilitate the emergence of 

distinct SBCO forms across states and over time, the state-year is the natural unit of 

analysis. The window of observation is from 1970 to 2000. 1970 serves as the baseline 

year because it was in that year that Rodale initiated preparations for the first 

certification program. The window ends in 2000, the year that the USDA released the 

final regulations that preempted all previous state organic food laws and rules.  

Dependent variable. SBCO founding is the dependent variable. I parsed founding into 

three distinct categories: the founding of a local nonprofit SBCO, the founding of the 

first OCIA chapter in a state, and the founding of a state SBCO. These data for the 

dependent variable come from multiple sources. For a yearly compilation of all 

SBCOs in existence in the United States, I drew from the National Organic Directory 

(NOD; 1983–1984, 1986–2001), published by the Community Alliance with Family 

Farmers. I also consulted three additional directories10 to capture all certification 

organizations that existed prior to their listing in the NOD. If directories did not list a 

founding date for the certification organization, calls were made to the organization to 

obtain it. If the organization had been dissolved, I contacted affiliated farmers or 

                                                 
10 One published by the Organic Farming Research Foundation, another by the Agricultural Marketing 
Service of the USDA, and a third by ATTRA (Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas). 



 

32 

organizations to obtain both a founding date and a dissolution date for the particular 

organization.  

Independent variables. The first set of independent variables in the model that are 

expected to predict the presence of a local nonprofit SBCO include the percentage of 

liberal voters in a state (Liberal voters) and the number of organic food wholesalers in 

a state (Wholesalers).  

I use the percentage of liberal voters in a state (Liberal voters) because states 

that had a solid left-leaning political base would be more likely to embrace the 

ideological underpinnings of local nonprofit SBCOs. The measure comes from 

Wright, Erikson, and McIver (1985) and is a time-invariant measure culled from 

76,000 respondents to 48 CBS News–New York Times general population and voter 

polls at the state level from 1974 to 1982. The measure is the percentage of people 

polled in a state that described their political views or themselves as “liberal” when it 

comes to political matters.   

The wholesaler variable is drawn from the NOD and from Food Co-ops: An 

Alternative to Shopping in Supermarkets (Ronco 1975), both of which list wholesalers 

that sell natural and organically grown or produced food. The NOD provides the most 

comprehensive listing of all wholesalers carrying organically produced food from 

1983 to 1984 and 1986 to 2000. Foods Co-ops was published in 1975. Although the 

food co-op movement also included the related natural food movement, the food co-op 

movement had a symbiotic connection to the development of organic food because the 

purveyors and customers of natural food stores shared the same anti-system 

ideological underpinning of pioneering organic farmers. To develop a longitudinal 

variable from these two sources that would cover the length of the observation period, 

I first established that the two sources were similar. I compared the 1983 wholesaler 

data from the NOD with the 1974 Food Co-ops data. I found a .86 correlation between 



 

33 

the two data sources. I then interpolated the NOD data and compared the interpolated 

1974 NOD data with the 1974 Food Co-ops data and found a .75 correlation. Based on 

these correlations, I combined the Food Co-ops and the NOD data and linearly 

interpolated and extrapolated to generate values for the missing years of data.  

To assess whether OCIA arises in states with greater agribusiness interests, I 

include a proxy measure for the presence of large farms in a state (Land/farms). To 

calculate Land/farms, I divided the total amount of farmland in a given state by the 

number of farms, thus providing a measure of the average size of farm in a given state.  

Finally, the independent variable expected to influence the presence of state 

SBCOs is a measure of the number of total provisions codified in law or 

administrative rules for each state-year (Total state provisions). This provides an 

assessment of the comprehensiveness of legal structure in a state. For this measure, I 

gathered data on all organic food laws and administrative rules from the first law 

passage in 1973 through the end of the observation period. To tabulate the total 

number of provisions present in state law or state administrative rules between 1973 

and 2000, I first consulted Westlaw. While Westlaw maintains a fairly comprehensive 

historical record of all U.S. statutes, administrative laws, and amendments, I found it 

necessary to conduct archival research to find legislation predating Westlaw’s 

database. After obtaining the first appearance of organic food legislation or 

administrative rules in each state, I then coded each state-year according to the number 

of provisions that each law contained. For each mention of a new provision, the state-

year received a one for that provision; otherwise, it received a zero. I summed across 

all provisions for a total number of provisions in a given state for a given year and 

then worked forward coding changes in the law reflected in amendments.  

Control Variables. A number of agriculturally related measures that may influence 

SBCO founding dynamics are included as controls. First, I control for the total number 



 

34 

of farms in a state. Because this variable was skewed, I took the natural log and call 

this variable Number of farms. Second, I control for the change in amount of farmland 

in a state (Change in acres). I also control for the change in the number of farms in a 

state (Change in # of farms). Finally, I control for the percentage of gross state product 

that is generated through agriculture (Farm revenue/GSP). Because these data were 

not available for the first seven years of the observation period, I used the STATA 

ipolate and epolate commands. I also control for significant changes in the legal 

environment of the certification organizations. I do this by creating a variable called 

Novel provisions. This variable is a cumulative measure of the number of novel 

provisions across U.S. states. By novel, I mean a provision that has never been 

codified in law. At the national level, I also control for the total number of SBCOs in 

the United States (Cum # SBCOs). Finally, I control for the presence of other forms of 

SBCOs in a state. Unless otherwise noted, all variables were constructed from 

historical agricultural data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the 

USDA.  

Modeling SBCO Foundings 

I use random effects logistic regression models to assess the effects of 

independent variables on the probability of the founding of a particular form of SBCO, 

clustering on state to reduce the bias associated with pooled, cross-sectional panel 

data. I do not use fixed effects models because they are unable to estimate effects for 

panel data that include cases for which there is no variation in the dependent variable 

over time. The majority of states do not experience the founding of any one kind of 

these certification organizations. Consequently, much of the sample is lost using fixed 

effects models. Nonetheless, several robustness checks were performed, including 

logistic and complementary log-log models that clustered observations by state and 



 

35 

calculated robust standard errors to control for heteroscedasticity (White 1982). These 

models produced results similar to those reported here.   

RESULTS 

Tables 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 report the summary statistics and correlations of the 

variables. Table 1.6 presents the results obtained from the SBCO analysis. Models 1 

and 2 report the results of the analysis of OCIA founding; models 3 and 4 report those 

of state SBCO founding; models 5 and 6 report those of local nonprofit SBCO 

founding. Overall, national variables such as the cumulative number of SBCOs and 

the number of novel legal provisions have a legitimating effect, encouraging the 

founding of all forms of SBCOs.  

Regarding the founding of OCIA chapters, states with greater numbers of 

farms and greater numbers of wholesalers predict the founding of OCIA chapters. 

Consistent with expectations, states dominated by larger farms (Land/farms) are more 

likely to experience OCIA-chapter founding.  

Models 3 and 4 report the results from the analysis of State SBCO founding. In 

these models, both local SBCO and OCIA chapter variables are negatively related to 

the founding of a state SBCO (and marginally significant in the case of local SBCO). 

With the exception of a few states (i.e., Washington and New Hampshire, whose local 

nonprofit SBCOs successfully petitioned the state to take responsibility for running 

certification programs), local nonprofits and OCIA chapters generally sought to retain 

their ability to certify organic producers without competition from the state. Many 

state programs, as expected, arose from decisions by state legislators and bureaucrats 

to pass laws that enabled the creation of a state certification program as demonstrated 

by the positive and significant predictor variable of Total state provisions. These types 

of state programs often arose in states with little organic infrastructure. For example, a 

state program was established in Nevada in 1998 even though only one major 



 

36 

wholesaler of organic food existed in the state at that time. This is somewhat borne out 

in the analysis, as the variable Wholesalers is a negative predictor of state programs, 

albeit not statistically significant.  

Finally, the founding of the local nonprofit form is, as expected, significantly 

and positively predicted by the variables Wholesaler and Liberal voters. It is also 

important to note that whereas the variable Land/farms is a positive and significant 

predictor of OCIA-chapter founding, it is negative and significant for the founding of 

local nonprofit SBCOs. This demonstrates that OCIA chapters were established 

largely in agribusiness-oriented states and local nonprofit SBCOs were not, providing 

initial indications that through OCIA, larger, less ideologically committed farmers 

entered into the organic market.11  

Notably, the presence of an OCIA chapter in a state inhibits the founding of 

local nonprofit SBCOs, as does the presence of state SBCOs (dropped from models 5 

and 6 due to perfect negative predictions of local nonprofit SBCOs). In other words, 

once state SBCOs are established in states, no local nonprofit SBCOs are founded in 

those states, and once OCIA chapters are formed in states, it is unlikely that a local 

nonprofit SBCO will be founded in those same states.   

                                                 
11 Further analyses that predict the size of producer and commitment to organic ideals are needed to 
substantiate this claim.  



 

 

37

 

 

 

TABLE 1.3: CORRELATION MATRIX FOR OCIA FORM-FOUNDING ANALYSES 
Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 
1. OCIA founding             
2. Number of farms .07            
3. Change in acres -.01 -.20           
4. Change in # farms -.01 -.20 .51          
5. Farm revenue/GSP .00 .02 -.01 .01         
6. Novel provisions .07 -.02 .04 .06 -.01        
7. Cum. # SBCOs .08 -.17 .10 .23 -.03 .09       
8. State SBCO .00 -.04 .04 .15 -.01 -.05 .46      
9. Local SBCO .06 -.07 .11 .10 -.01 .11 .24 -.12     
10. Wholesalers   .11 .16 -.04 .12 -.01 .01 .00 .01 .29    
11. Liberal voters .00 -.42 .13 .07 -.08 -.01 -.01 -.04 .29 .24   
12. Land/farms .01 -.35 -.03 .09 .02 .00 -.08 -.07 -.24 -.08 .13  
13. Total state provisions .00 .03 .01 .20 -.01 -.03 .49 .78 .00 .13 -.04 -.07 

 



 

 

38

 

 

 

TABLE 1.4: CORRELATION MATRIX FOR STATE SBCO FORM-FOUNDING ANALYSES 
Variable  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 
1. State SBCO founding             
2. Number of farms -.04            
3. Change in acres .02 -.14           
4. Change in # farms .01 -.22 .33          
5. Farm revenue/GSP .00 .02 .00 .01         
6. Novel provisions .09 -.01 .04 .04 -.01        
7. Cum. # SBCOs .11 -.03 .05 .21 -.02 .06       
8. OCIA  .02 .22 -.01 .04 .01 .02 .50      
9. Local SBCO -.02 -.03 .10 .15 -.02 .05 .35 .07     
10. Wholesalers   -.02 .15 -.08 .11 -.01 .00 .11 .10 .27    
11. Liberal voters .00 -.35 .09 .10 -.08 -.01 .00 -.04 .32 .24   
12. Land/farms .02 -.39 -.08 .10 .03 .00 -.05 -.01 -.29 -.08 .08  
13. Total state provisions .12 .08 -.05 .13 .00 .04 .40 .27 .27 .51 .08 -.02 

 



 

 

39

 

 

 

TABLE 1.5: CORRELATION MATRIX FOR LOCAL SBCO FORM-FOUNDING ANALYSES 
Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 
1. Local SBCO founding           
2. Number of farms .00          
3. Change in acres .02 -.10         
4. Change in # farms .02 -.20 .39        
5. Farm revenue/GSP -.01 .02 .00 .02        
6. Novel provisions .10 -.01 .04 .06 -.01      
7. Cum. # SBCOs .01 -.05 .03 .21 .00 .09     
8. OCIA  -.05 .13 -.02 .02 .02 .09 .53    
9. Wholesalers   .15 .17 -.02 .08 -.02 -.03 .01 .10   
10. Liberal voters .07 -.37 .06 .01 -.09 -.03 -.12 -.06 .20  
11. Land/farms -.08 -.49 -.05 .15 .02 .01 .10 .05 -.09 .22
12. Total state provisions -.05 .09 .03 .21 .00 -.06 .53 .13 .13 -.09 .06

 
 



 

 

40

TABLE 1.6: LOGISTIC REGRESSION MODELS OF SBCO FORM FOUNDING 
 OCIA form State form Local nonprofit form 
Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 
Number of farms .661** 1.159** -.202 -.083 .074 .189 
 (.249) (.398) (.366) (.259) (.162) (.215) 
Change in acres*100 .024 .077 .075 .185 .029 .033 
 (.105) (.117) (.222) (.210) (.012) (.143) 
Change in # of farms*100 -.010 -.015 -.017 -.035 .002 .007 
 (.011) (.011) (.036) (.026) (.012) (.017) 
Farm revenue/GSP .167 .238 -.821 -.177 -.082 .224 
 (.646) (.696) (7.085) (8.944) (.766) (1.259) 
Novel provisions .079+ .079+ .190** .147* .116** .126** 
 (.041) (.042) (.062) (.060) (.040) (.041) 
Cum. # SBCOs .044** .065** .131* .106* .011 .049** 
 (.015) (.017) (.064) (.042) (.025) (.015) 
State SBCO -.646 .623     
 (.870) (1.075)     
Local SBCO .519 .357 -1.465+ -1.356   
 (.494) (.601) (.869) (.855)   
OCIA SBCO   -.787 -1.003 -1.898 -2.411* 
   (.845) (.872) (1.174) (1.130) 
Wholesalers  .062*  -.282  .123* 
  (.028)  (.204)  (.054) 
Liberal voters  .051  .078  .201* 
  (.083)  (.081)  (.079) 
Land/farms  .691*  -.130  -1.249** 
  (.283)  (.337)  (.481) 
Standard errors in parentheses; + significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1% 



 

 

41

 

 

 

 

 

TABLE 1.6 (Continued) 
 OCIA form State form Local nonprofit form 
Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 
Total state provisions  -.085+  .180**  -.117 
  (.048)  (.053)  (.076) 
Constant -12.516** -19.925** -8.388* -9.752* -4.722* -10.119** 
 (2.861) (5.454) (3.496) (3.940) (2.034) (3.466) 
Observations 1184 1184 1336 1336 952 952 
Log likelihood -105.300 -97.686 -56.059 -49.892 -116.424 -97.554 



 

42 

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 

In this paper, I have documented the emergence and expansion of standards-

based certification organizations (SBCOs) in the organic food industry. There are clear 

temporal and geographic patterns of SBCO founding, and I have linked SBCO 

organizational form founding to distinctive facilitating state-level conditions. The 

initial development of the organic food industry occurred in states such as California, 

Maine, and Oregon that had strong, left-leaning political bases and populations of 

farmers and consumers that promoted an anti-mass consumer, organic ideology that 

facilitated the creation of an infrastructure of organic food wholesalers. In turn, these 

states experienced the creation of local nonprofit certification organizations. As the 

organic market grew, other states, dominated by large farms and agribusiness interests, 

experienced the founding of another SBCO form—OCIA. Growers in these states 

were less driven by ideology than those in states from which the original organic 

grassroots movement emerged. Instead, they saw the organic food industry as an 

economic opportunity. The founding of OCIA chapters in several key agricultural 

states facilitated the entry of much larger farmers into the organic industry. Increased 

legislative activity in the late 1980s and early 1990s generated the impetus and legal 

machinery necessary for state departments of agriculture to establish state-run SBCOs, 

constituting a third, unique SBCO form.  

By highlighting how distinct SBCO forms took root in different states 

characterized by distinct facilitative conditions, I have sought to expand understanding 

of how conditions in different locales led to the instantiation of a set of industry 

principles and practices in distinctive organizational forms that fostered the emergence 

and growth of an industry. I have argued that the theorization and development of a set 

of standards and certification procedures by early organic pioneers served as a 

”fence”—enacting a solid boundary around organic agriculture by which consumers 



 

43 

could differentiate organically grown products from conventionally grown food. Yet 

the codification of standards and the routinization of certification procedures 

facilitated the diffusion of organic to different locales, becoming instantiated in new 

governance organizations which subsequently served as “gates” by which outsiders to 

the organic movement entered into the organic marketplace, fostering endogenous 

change in the shape and trajectory of the industry.  

An important limitation of this study should be noted. It is difficult to extricate 

ideological explanations of organizational outcomes from material explanations 

because ideology fundamentally shapes organizational behavior as it does human 

agency (Simons and Ingram 1997) and influences organizational goals, strategies, 

structures, and processes (Scott Morton and Podolny 2002; Haveman and Khaire 

2004). As such, it is hard to determine if particular SBCO forms were founded in 

states for ideological reasons, for the particular material benefits they provided to their 

clients, or both. It is possible that one form of certification organization may have 

appealed to some groups of producers more than to others. For example, OCIA-

certified producers had access to international markets that producers certified by local 

nonprofit SBCOs did not. However, access to distant, national, and international 

markets has ideological ramifications as initial organic principles valued locally grown 

and locally consumed—a tension that is currently generating a substantial amount of 

controversy and press (Brady 2006; Economist 2006). Nonetheless, extricating 

material and ideological motivations would greatly enhance theoretical understanding 

of these processes.   

Future research should pay greater attention to the role of geography in 

facilitating the emergence and transposition of unique sets of actors, institutions, 

logics, and governance structures. Extant conceptions of institutional change in 

organization theory are dominated by temporal explanations. For example, changes in 



 

44 

governance structures in industries are considered over time, but rarely across polities 

or locales (e.g., Campbell et al. 1991; Scott et al. 2000). Similarly, shifts in 

institutional logics have been conceptualized as uncontested, higher order organizing 

principles that operate historically (quantified as period effects) that homogenously 

influence organizations within a given field (e.g., Thornton 2002). Greater 

appreciation for the fragmented nature of organizational fields and institutional 

environments is needed (Meyer, Scott, and Strang 1987; Powell 1991; Schneiberg and 

Soule 2005). Biggart and Beamish point out that “conventions of coordination are 

historically developed and local, and explain why the same industry is organized 

differently in different places. Differences are the result of actors’ pragmatic attempts 

to coordinate with others over time; multiple means of coordination are possible” 

(2003:457). These conventions often become localized institutions that can inform 

higher order institutional processes. For example, state legislators relied heavily on the 

standards and certification procedures when passing state law. In turn, federal 

lawmakers and bureaucrats drew heavily upon the legal-structural elements that had 

been created and subsequently refined by state-level actors and legislatures. Hence, 

being attentive to the various localized conventions and institutions that embody 

multiple interests and logics can inform understanding of broader, field-level 

institutional change.  

Another fruitful avenue to extend this research is to more fully explore the 

antecedents and consequences of outsider incursions into markets for what Rothschild 

and Whitt (1986) refer to as “oppositional goods and services.” These oppositional 

goods and services come into existence as a result of institutional entrepreneurs that 

“see some important social need that is unfilled by conventional businesses or public 

agencies” (p. 116). These types of markets are important from a public policy 

perspective because they are often the source of substantial economic and social 



 

45 

change that can fundamentally redefine preexisting norms, practices, and institutions. 

For example, organic pioneers sought to “establish a completely new system of food 

production and distribution” (Belasco 1989:69). While not entirely achieving their 

objectives, the pioneering work of organic activists has significantly altered 

agricultural practice and consumer behavior, making organic agriculture the fastest 

growing niche in U.S. and global agricultural markets. Other examples of oppositional 

goods and services include renewable-energy technologies, microcredit, fair-trade 

products, and green building—all of which seek to alter dominant institutions and 

extant production and distribution practices in their respective fields. Tensions arise in 

these types of markets because while advocates find justification for their markets’ 

existence through their opposition to mainstream institutions and organizations, they 

must nonetheless seek support, endorsement, and legitimacy from some of those same 

institutions. Further study of how these tensions are managed is critical to more fully 

understand under what conditions broader markets for oppositional goods and services 

are successful, frustrated, co-opted, or transformed. 



 

46 

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52 

PAPER 2:  
MECHANISMS GENERATING VARIATION:  

REGULATORY CHANGE IN THE ORGANIC FOOD INDUSTRY 

INTRODUCTION 

As a market or community of organizations grows and consumer demand 

increases for particular products or services, the state often takes an increasingly active 

role in monitoring organizations’ activities, endorsing and rewarding community 

members, and shaping the rules and standards for legitimate activities and outputs 

(Baum and Oliver 1992). The law, through instrumental as well as normative and 

cultural-cognitive means, has significant outcomes for organizational forms (Hannan 

and Freeman 1989; Fligstein 1990; Ranger-Moore, Banaszak-Holl, and Hannan 1991; 

Halliday, Powell, and Granfors 1993; Dobbin and Dowd 1997; Schneiberg 2002; 

Ingram and Rao 2004), the distribution of property rights (Campbell and Lindberg 

1990), the adoption and curtailing of practices within firms (Edelman 1990, 1992; 

Mezias 1990; Sutton, Dobbin, Meyer, and Scott 1994; Edelman, Uggen, and Erlanger 

1999; Kelly 2003), organizational performance (Carroll, Goodstein, and Gyenes 1988; 

Ingram and Simons 2000), and the creation and subsequent expansion of new markets 

(Dobbin 1994; Carruthers, Babb, and Halliday 2001; Fligstein 2001; Fligstein and 

Stone Sweet 2002).  

Despite insights generated through this research, the growing body of literature 

on law and markets has come under critique for its conceptualization of regulation as a 

uniform, exogenous environmental element— a “one-dimensional background 

incentive system reshaping parameters for means-ends rational calculation . . . without 

having the potential of altering the fundamental nature, goals or meaning of economic 

activity” (Stryker 2003:13). As this critique indicates, law has been operationalized in 

most studies as either a dichotomous variable (passed or not passed; e.g., Wade, 



 

53 

Swaminathan, and Saxon 1998) or as “regulatory periods” (e.g., Ranger-Moore et al. 

1991; Dobbin and Dowd 1997). Within such blunt-edged conceptualizations, variation 

that exists in the content and potential efficacy of law is not adequately accounted for. 

Nor are there clear explanations within these conceptualizations for the sources of 

regulation and how or why shifts in its content occur over time and across polities. 

To advance this literature, Stryker (2003) and Edelman and Stryker (2005) 

suggest that organizational sociologists move beyond theorizing law as an exogenous 

element to consider law and economy as “deeply embedded in social action and 

organization and linked through political and institutional mechanisms” (p. 527). 

Since relatively little is known about how organizations impact legal structure (much 

more is known about the inverse), treating law as a dependent variable is a significant 

move toward this end. However, there are a few studies that have treated law as a 

dependent variable, but these studies still generally under-specify outcomes by 

conducting formal modeling that constrains law to either or a “1” or a “0”—present or 

absent (e.g., Zhou 1993; Soule and Zylan 1997). This dichotomous operationalization 

masks much of the complexity and distinctiveness that accrues within legal code over 

time and space.1 Without an understanding of this complexity, institutionalization is 

often uncritically cast as a 1/0 affair (Strang and Sine 2002; Schneiberg and Clemens 

2006:217). 

The foregoing study argues that disrupting the trend of analytically 

homogenizing legislation opens possibilities for understanding variation in the content 

of what is being diffused (Strang and Soule 1998) and its relationship to intra-industry 

governance organizations—an approach that “presents a rich set of questions for new 

institutionalism” (Ingram and Clay 2002:532).  

                                                 
1 For example, Zhou (1993:545) treats licensing legislation as “institutionally similar” (and thus codes it 
dichotomously); Ingram and Rao (2004) similarly consider their dependent variable as a discrete event, 
coding the imposition of greater taxes on chains dichotomously (1/0).  



 

54 

Recent work (Schneiberg and Bartley 2001; Strang and Bradburn 2001; 

Ingram and Rao 2004; Schneiberg and Soule 2005) has begun to move toward a more 

nuanced understanding of the origins, antecedents, and factors that account for 

regulation within a market. These studies advance theories of state-market relations by 

tracing the influence of particular actors and institutional processes on the enactment 

of regulation. In addition to identifying antecedents, these studies move beyond the 

dichotomous modeling of law as present/absent to differentiate between distinct types 

of regulation.2 

I advance this research agenda here by focusing needed attention on how 

standards-based certification organizations (SBCOs)3—key sources of industrial order 

in many industries—influence the content and evolution of state regulation. Such an 

approach is congruent with ongoing conversations in political science regarding the 

blurring of public and private governance (Streeck and Schmitter 1985; Stoker 1998; 

Pierre and Peters 2000; Kersbergen and Van Waarden 2004). Although theoretical 

work has highlighted the key role that associations and standards organizations play in 

the governance of markets and industries (e.g., Streeck and Schmitter 1985; Brunsson 

and Jacobsson 2000; Campbell, Hollingsworth, and Lindberg 1991; Scott, Ruef, 

Mendel, and Caronna 2000), an understanding of the relationship between these types 

of governance organizations and the state is relatively undeveloped. In this paper, I 

consider the dynamic nature of law content, hoping to answer questions regarding 

when and under what conditions private governance organizations influence legal 

dynamics.  

                                                 
2 For instance, Schneiberg and Bartley (2001) used a competing-risks model to determine the 
antecedents of full rate-control legislation versus weaker, antidiscrimination legislation in the early fire 
insurance industry. In their study of anti-chain-store laws, Ingram and Rao (2004) modeled both the 
enactment and the repeal of legislation.  
3 By SBCO, I mean an organization whose primary purpose is to create and promote standards, verify 
the compliance of other organizations to those standards, and formally acknowledge that an 
organization has met the standards through the conferral of a certification, endorsement, or 
accreditation.  



 

55 

This question is theoretically significant for several reasons. First, there is 

limited research on the influence of private governance institutions (Ingram and Clay 

2000) such as SBCOs, particularly vis-à-vis the state. Second, with only two notable 

exceptions, which will be reviewed below (Grattet, Jenness, and Curry 1998; Strang 

and Bradburn 2001), studies of industry legal structures primarily consider general 

patterns of diffusion, not the specific content of laws. By accounting for patterns of 

variation in content, my study provides a more precise, nuanced understanding of the 

relationship between the state and private governance within an industry context. 

Third, to this point, the only theoretically significant, longitudinal categorization of the 

content of law (Grattet et al. 1998) has not been empirically tested, nor has it been 

applied specifically to a market/industry context. Building on this promising but still 

emergent body of work, this study takes as a point of departure the notion that 

accounting for the differential content of laws and the political processes that drive 

them is crucial to a comprehensive theory of state-market relations.  

To develop this theory, I highlight contributions from two different approaches 

that serve as starting points. One set of these studies emphasizes how organizational 

actors influence law creation and change, establishing a middle ground between overly 

structural or overly interest-based explanations of regulation. A second subset of 

studies focuses direct attention on laws, their specific provisions, and their internal 

dynamics, addressing current weaknesses in the literature that deemphasizes law as a 

phenomenon to be explained. Taken together, these studies highlight the importance of 

considering the role of organizational action and interests in impacting the content and 

trajectory of law.  

THEORY 

In counterpoint to conventional accounts of diffusion and institutional change 

that suggest that the adoption of structure and practices are driven initially by 



 

56 

perceptions of efficiency and then become legitimate and taken for granted (Tolbert 

and Zucker 1983; Zhou 1993; Grattet et al. 1998), a set of scholars are increasingly 

integrating political factors into accounts of the creation and spread of legal and 

regulatory policies and structures (Schneiberg and Bartley 2001; Schneiberg 2002; 

Ingram and Rao 2004; Edelman and Stryker 2005; Schneiberg and Soule 2005). For 

example, Schneiberg and Soule (2005) found that the institutionalization of insurance-

rate regulation among U.S. states represented a “settlement” resulting from political 

conflicts over competing models of industrial order. This settlement was a product of 

social movement mobilization and multilevel institutional processes that resulted in a 

“multiplex, fractured institutional field” (p. 152). Federated state systems allowed for 

“diverse but largely uncorrelated and relatively weak pockets of institutionalization . . 

.” and “the presence of multiple platforms and ports of entry create[ed] possibilities 

for broadly organized but competing projects, the development of institutional 

contradiction within or across levels, and the institutionalization of multiple, even 

contradictory, industrial orders” (p. 156). This research demonstrates that diffusion 

can be profoundly political and is driven by “the political dynamics of opposition, 

argumentation, contestation, and compromise” (p. 156). Such political contestation 

and its influences provide an agency and action-oriented approach to 

institutionalization in which extant institutional arrangements are viewed as 

settlements arrived at through “articulation, layering, bricolage, and recombination 

rather than homogenization or convergence” (p. 157).  

Similarly, Ingram and Rao (2004) reveal how competition between rival 

organizational forms can be manifest in broader regulative structures. Using the anti-

chain-store movement and the countermobilization by chain stores of the early 

twentieth century as a context, they demonstrate how multilevel political and 

institutional dynamics influenced the passage and repeal of state-level anti-chain-store 



 

57 

legislation. A Supreme Court ruling deeming constitutional an anti-chain-store law in 

Indiana spurred 27 additional state legislatures to enact legislation that imposed higher 

taxes on chain stores. Counter-mobilization efforts on the part of chain stores ensued. 

Chain stores fought tax legislation and sought to improve their public image through a 

collective association called the National Chain Store Association (NCSA). From their 

analysis, Ingram and Rao found that the number of independent stores and the degree 

of independent homogeneity4 predicted the passage of anti-chain-store legislation. By 

contrast, and consistent with the counter-mobilization thesis, the number of chain 

stores prevented the enactment of such laws. This research underscores the idea that 

endorsement and support of the state is not a given nor an exogenous outcome of 

broader social and economic changes as much current research maintains. Rather, it is 

often the outcome of actions of competing organizations and broader institutional 

processes within an industry.  

Given that laws and rules are central to social order in virtually every facet of 

social life, a focus on legal structure provides a useful context to understand the 

mechanisms that generate and challenge order in organizational fields/markets. In a 

study of the British Columbia Water Act from 1914 to 2002, Jennings, Schulz, Patient, 

Gravel, and Yuan (2005) found that the evolution of water law was characterized by 

periods of incremental expansion and increased complexity that were punctuated by 

legal rule consolidation and rewriting that resulted in functionally differentiated law. 

Consolidation of BC water law transformed organically evolved, redundant legal 

structures into modern, structurally unique sets of rules that displaced particularistic 

rules with fewer, broadly applicable rules meant to cover a broad class of situations. 

Such dynamics tend to increase “the modularity of the rule system and thereby 

                                                 
4 Homogeneity in this setting refers to the degree to which independent stores within a state belonged to 
the same retail segments (e.g., druggists, shoe stores, grocers). A Herfindahl index was used to 
construct this variable.  



 

58 

facilitates independent adaptation by its parts” (Jennings et al. 2005:643). While this 

paper places needed attention on the nature and evolution of the corpus of law, it 

neglects the role of actors that may have driven and/or been served by these rule 

changes.  

Two other relevant studies focus attention on the content of law. In a study of 

the content of hate crime laws in the United States, Grattet et al. (1998) identify two 

mechanisms that contribute to variation in content across state laws: exclusivity and 

domain expansion. Exclusivity refers to the practice of adopting a law as a symbolic 

gesture (generally to appease constituencies) and leaving it unrevised even as updated 

versions appear in other states. To illustrate the mechanism of exclusivity, Grattet et 

al. point to the fact that most states passed a single hate crime law at only one point in 

time (only 8 of 33 adopted more than one type of hate crime law, and only 3 of those 8 

did so through subsequent amendments). Once this initial law was passed in most 

states, legislators remained committed to that approach and did not amend it even 

when more progressive laws were passed in other states. In the absence of updating 

laws to be consistent with contemporary trends, exclusivity contributed to overall legal 

heterogeneity.  

The second mechanism, domain expansion,5 refers to the process by which 

initial, narrowly written statutes gave way to more expansive ones. According to 

Grattet et al. (1998), as the existence of a particular category of law becomes 

institutionalized and thus taken for granted, legislators and their constituencies are 

more apt to amend/tailor the law. In the context of hate crime law, they find that once 

the existence of such law was well established, state legislatures were able to more 

                                                 
5 Drawing from social problems literature, domain expansion refers to “increases in the ‘substantive 
territory’ (in terms of both activities and protected statuses) covered by the law and/or institutions 
positioned to construct and respond to a social problem” (Grattet et al. 1998:291). For example, Best 
(1990) describes how particular definitions of child abuse gained currency among professionals. “Child 
abuse” replaced an earlier, narrower concept of “battered child,” and the phrase “child abuse and 
neglect” was eventually favored over just “child abuse.” 



 

59 

fully elaborate on the basic form that was available for imitation. Elaboration on the 

basic theme of hate crime legislation led to increased diversity of legal content in the 

later period of diffusion. While this study develops important mechanisms to account 

for variation in legal content, it, like the water law study, fails to account for the role 

of interests in these processes.  

By contrast, Strang and Bradburn (2001) attend to both content and interests in 

a study of the content of state-level health maintenance organization (HMO) 

legislation. Before the passage of the federal HMO Act, there was high variation in the 

content of state laws. Following the passage of this federal legislation, this 

heterogeneity declined rapidly. The federal law and various model laws established by 

industry associations such as the National Association of Insurance Commissioners 

and the National Association of HMO Regulators provided state legislators with 

templates to guide their efforts to fashion and enact legislation in their respective 

states. Strang and Bradburn deduce that convergence upon a set of core legal 

provisions occurred due to the availability of these models, which were promoted 

through strong associational networks. Nonetheless, some elements of the state laws 

were more susceptible to political action. For example, states with more HMOs were 

more likely to pass legislation mandating “dual choice,” which provided HMOs with 

mandated access to employee groups, but were less likely to pass laws that 1) provided 

plan members a say over HMO governance; and 2) that mandated open enrollment, 

which opened plans to all people despite their insurance risk. The findings of this 

study suggest that HMOs were not the drivers of HMO policy, but their reaction to 

state law demonstrated that HMOs mobilized to amend both state and federal 

regulatory provisions to their benefit. This study is an important step in linking 

variation in law content with the configuration of interests present in organizational 

fields. 



 

60 

Integrating these two sets of studies, important theoretical advances are to be 

had by pursuing research that examines the role of organizational action in regulatory 

change and evolution. Based on the findings of these studies, it is plausible that intra-

industry governance organizations such as SBCOs may be important in shaping the 

dynamics of legal regulation of industries. In the following section, I introduce the 

empirical context for this study, which is then followed by hypotheses, data and 

methods, results, and conclusions.  

EMPIRICAL CONTEXT 

In December of 2000, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 

issued binding rules to govern the organic food industry with the intent to assure 

consumers that agricultural products labeled as organic meet consistent and uniform 

standards. These rules were implemented the following spring, and the USDA granted 

a transitional period that extended to October of 2002. As part of this sweeping federal 

program, the USDA established the National Organic Program (NOP), whose purpose 

is to develop and implement national standards to govern the marketing of agricultural 

products as organically produced. NOP regulations require that agricultural products 

labeled as organic originate from farms or handling operations certified by a state or 

private agency that has been accredited by USDA.  

However, prior to the federal standards and accreditation system, a patchwork 

of SBCOs and state organic food laws6 served as the primary source of governance 

and enforcement in the U.S. organic food industry. In 1973, Oregon passed the first 

state-level regulation, predating the federal legislation by 17 years. Drawing heavily 

on the principles, practices, and standards developed by organic grower communities 

and nascent certification programs, the Oregon 1973 regulation included a definition 
                                                 
6 For the purposes of this paper, I refer to both statutory law (law enacted by the legislative branch of 
government) and administrative law (the legally binding body of regulations, rules, and orders of 
administrative agencies in the government) when I use such terms as “law,” “regulation,” or “statutes.”  



 

61 

of “organic food” 7 and “organically processed food”; required that organic producers 

keep records for two years; dictated that anything labeled as organic shall contain no 

more than 10 percent of the allowable residues of any pesticide or other synthetic or 

artificial substances; promulgated rudimentary livestock rules and banned the use of 

antibiotics; required that certifier contact information be on the label of the organic 

food; mandated the state to investigate reasonable reports of violations of the law; and 

included a provision that made illegal the labeling of something as organic that was 

not produced in accordance to the law. Thus, this first organic food law, while only 

two pages, codified into law key definitions, basic production rules and processes, and 

punitive measures.  

Soon after the Oregon regulation, a number of states passed organic laws—

Massachusetts in 1978 and Maine, California, and Connecticut in 1979. The 

Connecticut and Massachusetts laws were succinct, whereas those of Maine and 

California were more comprehensive in scope. California’s definition of organic 

moved beyond that of Oregon’s by including both prohibited and permitted materials 

for use in the production, harvesting, and processing of organic food products. For 

example, the law permitted the use of Bordeaux mixes, soluble kelp, lime, sulfur, 

gypsum, and soap but prohibited the use of petroleum solvents, diesel, and all other 

petroleum fractions. This list of appropriate and prohibited substances became known 

as the “materials list.” Following its initial appearance in California law, similar 

materials lists found their way into much of the subsequent regulation established in 

other states. In addition, the California law was particularly innovative in linking the 

term “organic” directly to the state code through labeling. The 1979 legislation 

required that all products marketed as organic include on their label the following 

                                                 
7 “Food which has been grown: without being subjected to pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, or other 
synthetic chemicals: in soil in which the humus content is increased only by the addition of natural 
matter: and in soil in which the mineral content is increased only by the application of natural mineral 
fertilizers of other natural matter” (Oregon 1980). 



 

62 

phrase: “Organically Grown in Accordance with Section 26569.11 of the California 

Health and Safety Code” (California 1979:3146).  

Following the passage of these early laws, a handful of Plains states, including 

North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska, passed organic food laws. These laws 

were more concise and had little in common with existing laws in California, Oregon, 

and Maine. Although all of these states defined organic, none required organic 

labeling to comply with state code. Verification methods were limited to state-

conducted inspections in most states. Punitive elements were scant, with the majority 

of laws only outlining a mislabeling clause.  

Pioneering a dramatically different type of law in 1985, Washington passed 

legislation that mandated the creation of a state-run organic certification program, 

initiating a move that subsequent states would follow. Texas shortly thereafter also 

established a state certification program. Although the Washington and Texas laws 

included many of the provisions common to the California and Maine laws, Texas 

added a number of novel provisions that gave the State Department of Agriculture 

clear jurisdiction over the creation and enforcement of organic standards. The 

department developed a certification program, retained the right to inspect property 

and records, and had the power to take punitive measures against violators of the law. 

Such power was manifest in the form of injunctions, revocation of certification status, 

imposition of fines, and the issuing of stop-sale orders.  

Having comprehensive models of state programs to build from, other states 

began passing organic food laws and establishing state certification organizations. 

Between 1989 and 1990, 13 states passed legislation, with 8 establishing state-run 

certification organizations. These laws differed dramatically from those established in 

the late 1970s and were more consistent with the 1988 Texas law. They all included a 

definition of “producer,” created a state label (e.g., “Idaho Certified Organic”) and 



 

63 

mandated the respective state departments of agriculture to create a certification 

program. Other common provisions included mislabeling clauses, fines, inspections by 

the state, revocation of certification status, and definitions of “processor,” 

“distributor,” and “certification.” 

Nearly all of these laws mandated the establishment of an advisory board. The 

board generally consisted of department employees, organic producers, consumers, 

and cooperative extension employees. The board assisted the director in formulating 

and carrying out the state organic program. In some cases, this board was given power 

to levy fees to ensure the continued functioning of the certification program.  

Prevalent in these laws were provisions requiring producers to register with the 

state and provisions to assure that all food labeled as organic was in compliance with 

the state code. Also present was a shift in the constitutive language of the law. The 

longer, more explicit definitions of organic found in earlier laws were either replaced 

by the term “certified organic” or supplemented with language indicating the need to 

certify products. For example, Colorado’s 1989 law defined organic as “agricultural 

products grown or produced in Colorado without the use of synthetic pesticides, 

synthetically compounded fertilizers, or synthetic growth hormones and certified by 

the department as complying with all standards and regulations established by this 

article” (Colorado 1989:1376, emphasis added). Thus, laws that redefined “organic” 

to mean “certified organic” required all food labeled as organic to be compliant with 

state code. This development coupled with the authorization to conduct certification 

equated to a significant increase in state participation in the industry.  

States with existing organic food laws also saw the period from 1989 to 1990 

as a time to revisit and amend these laws. Texas, Washington, Colorado, New 

Hampshire, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, 

and Maine all amended their laws to update the legal language and increase the 



 

64 

comprehensiveness and efficacy of their laws. For example, in all of these states, 

idiosyncratic definitions of “organic” were supplemented with definitions that 

included “certified organic.” In the case of California, which had the most 

comprehensive organic food law at the time (with the exception of states with state-

run certification programs), amendments required certification organizations and 

producers to register with the state. They also mandated the imposition of fines for 

those who mislabeled products.  

Between 1973 and 2000, 36 states passed organic food laws. These laws 

exhibited significant variation in their content. Some states passed statutes of just one 

paragraph, whereas others exceeded 60 pages of text. Figure 2.1 shows the temporal 

patterning of state-law passage and amendments.  

HYPOTHESES 

To move beyond dichotomous conceptualizations of regulatory structure that 

tend to dominate diffusion and institutional literatures (Strang and Soule 1998), I focus 

on mechanisms that generate variation in legal content. Content variation is an 

important topic of study because it allows assessment of the degree of 

convergence/divergence of regulatory structures across polities. Further, it permits 

more accurate mapping of particular legal content to specific field-level interests 

(Strang and Bradburn 2001). I focus on two key mechanisms responsible for variation 

in law content. The first mechanism is regulatory inertia. By regulatory inertia, I refer 

to regulation that is passed but is then left unrevised even as more efficacious or 

legitimate versions of similar regulation exist in other states.8 Therefore, as laws 

change over time, those states that do not update their laws contribute to overall legal 

heterogeneity.  

                                                 
8 Regulatory inertia is similar to Grattet et al.’s (1998) concept of exclusivity. 



 

65 

 
 

FIGURE 2.1: NUMBER OF ORGANIC FOOD LAWS AND AMENDMENTS 
PASSED, 1970–2000 

A second mechanism that can contribute to legal heterogeneity in a 

comparative analysis is regulatory elaboration. By regulatory elaboration,9 I refer to 

the refinement or expansion of existing legal structure. Legal elaboration occurs 

through formal legislative amendment or through bureaucratic rule processes. Legal 

elaboration is an important element of legal evolution because it represents efforts to 

clarify extant regulation and/or expand the scope and efficacy of existing rules. Such 

efforts are generally driven by interested parties with sufficient resources to instigate 

change, or alternatively, by crises that require the state to revisit previously mandated 

regulation.  

                                                 
9 Regulatory elaboration is similar to Grattet et al.’s (1998) concept of domain expansion. 

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

Law passage Amendments



 

66 

While both inertia and elaboration mechanisms work against conformity and 

standardization of regulation across states, past research suggests they do so for 

contrasting reasons that function as a result of temporal differentiation. In their study 

of hate crime legislation, Grattet et al. (1998) find that inertia occurred in the early 

history of hate crime laws because states did not yet have a dominant model to look to 

when crafting legislation. By contrast, elaboration occurred later because once the 

general principles of the legislation were in place, legislators were freer to expand the 

domain of hate crime law to include broader conceptions of what constituted a hate 

crime and what groups received protected status under the law. Based on their 

findings, the authors conclude that timing is everything: “the content of a state’s law is 

contingent upon when it enters the ongoing institutionalization process” (Grattet et al. 

1998:303). I examine this conclusion and the conceptual/predictive power of 

regulatory inertia and elaboration in the context of organic food industry law. The first 

hypothesis I propose is to assess if inertia and elaboration occur in a similar temporal 

fashion in the U.S. organic food industry as was found in the context of hate crime 

legislation. Thus, 

 

Hypothesis 1: Regulatory inertia in state organic food laws will occur during 

the early period of industry law passage. Regulatory elaboration will occur in 

the later period.  

 

According to Grattet et al. (1998), timing should explain the occurrence of 

regulatory inertia and elaboration. However, I posit that timing may not be the primary 

factor in determining differential content of law. As a host of scholars suggest 

(Schneiberg and Bartley 2001; Strang and Bradburn 2001; Schneiberg 2002; Ingram 

and Rao 2004; Schneiberg and Soule 2005), organized interests play a central role in 



 

67 

shaping regulatory structures. More specifically, Strang and Bradburn (2001) have 

shown how interests have impacts on the differential content of the law itself.  

As noted in the previous paper, SBCOs were central to the development of the 

organic food industry because they created and promulgated standards, verified 

growers’ compliance with those standards, and then provided a certification or 

endorsement to compliant growers. The development of these key conventions 

decreased the information asymmetries between producer and consumer regarding 

product quality (Akerlof 1970) and facilitated the rationalization of the nascent market 

for organic products, moving it from a “movement” to an “industry.”  

SBCOs generally rely on normative pressure and incentives to get other 

organizations to adopt and subsequently adhere to their standards (Brunsson and 

Jacobsson 2000). To preserve their normative power, they tend to avoid efforts by the 

state to control their affairs. For example, when federal legislation was a possibility in 

the early 1990s, one local nonprofit SBCO reported being wary of the “possibility of 

government agencies taking over certification” and adamantly maintained that “any 

organic legislation should allow for the presence of private certification organizations” 

(Sills 1989:11). This local SBCO formed a committee to “study the possible 

appropriate changes in the state law and form a consensus about our role in federal 

legislation” (Sills 1989:11).  

While SBCOs tend to avoid being controlled by the state, SBCOs nonetheless 

frequently seek to influence and control state policies (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000; 

Sassen 1998; Hirst and Thompson 1996) in order to limit intrusive state intervention 

and to preserve and enhance their own normative power within their respective field of 

influence. Further, SBCOs, like industry associations and other collective actors, can 

be influential in the regulatory process because legislatures and state agencies tend to 

rely on industry groups for expertise, information, and, in the case of agencies, for 



 

68 

personnel to carry out their duties (Breyer 1982; Yeager 1990; Edelman and Stryker 

2005). SBCOs in particular can exert substantial influence because of their pre-

existing intra-industry governance mechanisms that can easily serve as models for 

state legislation.  

Despite ostensible justification for participation in influencing the construction 

of regulatory infrastructure, not all SBCOs engage in efforts to shape state-level 

regulatory structure. Recent calls to explain sources of heterogeneity in organizational 

fields (Lounsbury and Ventresca 2002; Schneiberg and Clemens 2006) suggest that 

disaggregating organizational forms into more distinct categories may reveal much 

regarding their resource mobilization potential, fundamental differences in ideologies, 

and the scope and/or focus of distinct organizational forms. Understanding these 

subtle differences can shed light on the degree to which organizational forms can 

succeed in achieving higher order institutional outcomes.  

In the context of the U.S. organic food industry, I argue that certain SBCOs 

exhibited features and proclivities that allowed them to serve broader purposes beyond 

core functions associated with certification and made them more likely to be interested 

in fostering state-level regulatory infrastructure. I maintain that these two factors had 

implications for the regulatory dynamics of the states in which they were located.  

In the previous paper, I arrayed SBCOs along five key dimensions (source of 

solidarity, authority structure, social control/relations, incentive structures, and 

specialization) that highlighted salient differences in the degree to which SBCOs could 

be classified as more collectivist or more bureaucratic in orientation. Local nonprofit 

SBCOs tended to maintain a shared ideology that served as a primary means of 

cohesion and commitment manifest in the use of volunteer labor to accomplish 

organizational goals and day-to-day tasks. This facilitated the ability to engage in 

collective behavior that would benefit the organic market as a whole. Such ideological 



 

69 

commitment is noted as a key element of solidarity within business groups 

(Granovetter 2005). Further, local nonprofit SBCOs were more likely to have control 

over local institutions, to make decisions that would affect the behavior of local 

organizations, and to redress conflict within the community rather than resort to an 

extra-local organization to resolve the issue. Furthermore, local nonprofit SBCOs and 

their members were generally focused on state and local marketing outlets for their 

products. Finally, these organizations engaged in various activities such as the creation 

and distribution of monthly newsletters, hosting conferences, and giving on-site 

workshops that enhanced their ability to mobilize and lobby for organic food laws. 

Anecdotal evidence suggests that certification organizations, recognizing the need for 

regulation, initiated most of the early organic food laws (California Action Network 

1989). For example, in California, CCOF wrote the 1990 legislation and worked 

closely with Assemblyman Sam Farr (D-Monterey) to pass it into law (Brammer 

1989). In an editorial in the CCOF newsletter, a retailer of organic food reflected upon 

the political power that CCOF had developed: 

I think the work CCOF has done for this legislation produces benefits much 
more valuable than the legislation itself. CCOF has positioned itself and the 
California organic trade as a player in Sacramento. It has made political 
connections and won some respect. It has opened up lines of communication 
with CDFA and has clearly identified CDHS’ lack of desire to serve the 
organic trade. With more money and support from other sectors in the 
California organic trade, we will be able to exercise some political muscle in 
the coming years and make real changes. (Fishman 1989)  

Interviews with local nonprofit SBCO members and employees revealed 

similar efforts by SBCOs to participate in both the writing and passage of state organic 

food laws. For example, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association 

(MOFGA) actually wrote Maine’s first organic labeling law. MOFGA played a central 

role in writing the subsequent amendments following the initial law passage 

(Interview, January 17, 2002). Given their mobilization capacity generated through 



 

70 

shared ideology, past organizational experience, and existing infrastructure, and their 

focus on local markets, I posit:  

 

Hypothesis 2a: States with local nonprofit SBCOs will be more likely to 

experience regulatory elaboration.  

Hypothesis 2b: States with local nonprofit SBCOs will be less likely to 

experience regulatory inertia. 

 

In contrast to local nonprofit SBCOs’ bottom-up approach, chapters of the 

nationally federated certification organization, OCIA, were founded largely through a 

top-down process in which OCIA employees actively recruited conventional farmers 

into organic markets. Unlike their local nonprofit counterparts, OCIA members were 

interested primarily in certification and the economic gains to be had from growing 

organic. Consequently, they had less of an ideological component motivating their 

membership and actions in the marketplace, decreasing their potential mobilization 

capacity. In addition, OCIA chapters focused on national and international markets 

(outside the jurisdictional boundaries of state governments), which made them 

presumably less affected by and less interested in state-level legislation.10 

Consequently, OCIA members left state-level political lobbying to other players in the 

growing industry. When asked about OCIA’s role in lobbying for state legislation, a 

past director of OCIA said, “OCIA was interested, but they really didn’t guide the 

chapters in that respect. They would tell the chapters that you should do this [lobby for 

legislation] but they really didn’t supply guidance.” She indicated that OCIA members 

                                                 
10  This is similar to Ingram and Rao’s (2004) finding that chain stores (national organizations with 
national interests) sought influence through the Supreme Court, whereas independent stores, with their 
relatively limited resources and organization, pursued a strategy that targeted public opinion and state 
legislatures. While OCIA and local nonprofits were not directly in conflict in the same way the 
independent and national chains were over anti-chain-store legislation, they were similar with regard to 
their strategies and capabilities.  



 

71 

were largely indifferent to lobbying for state legislation: “. . . Most of them [the 

farmers] said, ‘I just want to farm my fields’” (Interview, July 23, 2004). An 

informant from Ohio corroborated this finding, suggesting that while OCIA was not 

active in lobbying for a state organic food law, the local certification organization, the 

Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), was the driving force behind 

its passage. 

As such, I posit that OCIA’s influence on state-level laws would tend toward 

inertia—if a law is passed in a state dominated by OCIA, I would expect it to be 

revisited with less frequency. According to this line of reasoning, I hypothesize:  

 

Hypothesis 3a: States with OCIA chapters will be less likely to experience 

regulatory elaboration.  

Hypothesis 3b: States with OCIA chapters will be more likely to experience 

regulatory inertia. 

DATA AND METHODS 

Given that the United States is a fragmented state structure (Meyer and Scott 

1983), U.S. states have historically been the sites of substantial legal, political, and 

economic activity that results in geographically distinct institutions, governance 

structures, meaning systems, and practices (Markusen 1985, 1987; Saxenian 1994). 

Because I focus on the relationship between SBCOs and legal structure across states 

and over time, the state-year is the natural unit of analysis for this study. The window 

of observation is from 1970 to 2000. 1970 serves as the baseline year because it was in 

that year that Rodale initiated preparations for the first certification program. The 

window ends in 2000, the year that the USDA released the final regulations that 

preempted all previous state organic food laws and rules.  



 

72 

Dependent Variables. Data for the dependent variables in this study are drawn from all 

state organic food laws and administrative rules from the first law passage in 1973 

through the end of the observation period in 2000. I first consulted Westlaw to obtain 

all legal code in all states related to organic food production between 1973 and 2000. 

While Westlaw maintains a fairly comprehensive historical record of all states’ legal 

statutes, administrative laws, and amendments, I found it necessary to conduct 

archival research to access legislation predating Westlaw’s database. After obtaining 

all organic food legislation/administrative law (and subsequent amendments) for each 

state, I coded each state-year according to the number of provisions that each law 

contained.11 For each mention of a new provision, the state-year received a one for 

that provision, otherwise, zero. See Appendix A for a list of all provision categories. 

This vector of 1 and 0s became the basis for the dependent variable Legal variation. 

Because a vector of over 100 provisions is unwieldy for analysis, I used the 

vector to generate a similarity score for each state. To do so, I first established a 

baseline from which to compare all state-years. This baseline was the first law passed 

(Oregon 1973). To compute similarity of all other state-years to the Oregon 1973 law, 

I used the Sorenson-Dice binary-based similarity measure (Dice 1945):  

cba
a
++2

2
 

                                                 
11  Issues of intercoder reliability are important to consider when coding messages and textual artifacts 
(Neuendorf 2002). However, intercoder reliability is markedly more important for latent, rather than 
manifest, content because with latent content, coders must make subjective judgments and 
interpretations based on their own mental schema (Potter and Levine-Donnerstein 1999). Legal 
regulation is manifest content because regulatory language seeks to be as plain as possible by defining 
key terms, clearly stating the obligations and rights of persons affected, and delineating key elements of 
compliance. As such, it is substantively much easier to code than latent ideas present in conversations 
or in newspaper stories. Therefore, I alone coded all data, taking care to capture all provisions in all 
state regulation. To do this, I began with one state law and coded all regulatory elements. I then coded a 
second piece of legislation. If the second had new provisions, I created a new category for that 
provision and went back and checked the first law for the new provision. Once I had reviewed all 
legislation for all states (and all subsequent amendments), and exhausted the number of possible 
provisions across state-years, I then re-read all statutes once more to check for any miscoding that may 
have occurred in earlier statutes read. 



 

73 

where a is the co-occurrence of a provision in both laws; b is the presence of a 

provision in the Oregon 1973, but not in the other state-year being compared to the 

baseline; and c is the inverse (presence of a provision in the state-year being 

compared, but not present in the Oregon 1973 year). The Sorenson-Dice measure is in 

a class of similarity measures that do not consider negative co-occurrences.12 As 

apparent from the measure, Sorenson-Dice weights positive co-occurrences of 

provisions, which in the case of organic food laws is favorable because it emphasizes 

the active inclusion in a law.  

The raw similarity measure calculated for each state-year thus shows how 

much a given state in year t deviates from the original vector of provisions in the 

Oregon 1973 law.13 Instead of inferring inertia by simply considering which states 

passed one law but then never altered that law (Grattet et al. 1998), I develop a more 

complex measure that takes into account legal content variation among all states on a 

temporal basis. To construct this measure, I calculated the mean similarity score for all 

laws by year for each year of the observation window. I then subtracted each state’s 

similarity score in year t from the mean similarity score for all states in year t. A 

higher value (values ranged from .27 to -.37) for a particular state-year set of 

provisions means it is less similar to the Oregon 1973 law than the overall mean for 

that year. Conversely, a lower value means that a particular state-year configuration of 

provisions is more similar to the Oregon 1973 law than the overall mean for that year. 

For example, in 2000, Montana had a similarity score of .6; it was the state most 

similar to Oregon 1973 for that year. However, the overall mean for 2000 was .23. 

Thus, Montana in 2000 deviated from the yearly mean score in 2000 by .37. In 

contrast to Montana 2000, the opposite condition exists for Nebraska 1986. Nebraska 

                                                 
12 In a study of molecular markers, the Sorenson-Dice coefficient was found to be an effective and 
efficient measure, prompting the authors to suggest its use for practical applications (Duarte, Santos, 
and Melo 1999). 
13 Because Oregon 1973 was used as the baseline, I excluded Oregon from the data set. 



 

74 

passed a law in 1986, with the similarity score being .13. As such, Nebraska was quite 

different from Oregon 1973. In 1986, the mean similarity score for all states was .40, 

suggesting that the overall mean of all state similarity measures for 1986 was closer to 

the Oregon 1973 law than was Nebraska’s. Consequently, the Nebraska 1986 law 

deviated from the 1986 mean by .27.  

Because I am interested in the degree to which a state is inertial in its state law 

content for a given year, I take the absolute value of the difference between the mean 

similarity score for all states at year t and the similarity score for each state at year t. 

This yields a dependent variable capable of capturing individual state deviation from 

the yearly mean in either direction (+ or -). Thus, the dependent variable, once the 

absolute value is taken, ranges from 0 to .37. 

To analyze Legal variation, I used a linear regression model. Because the data 

set consists of multiple state observations, observations are not independent, violating 

a core assumption of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. As such, these data are 

prone to serial and cross-sectional autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity. To correct 

for these problems, I use the xtreg command with the fixed effects option in Stata 9 to 

model the dependent variable Legal variation. Because the dependent variable ranges 

from 0 to .37 and is truncated, tobit analyses were conducted and resulted in identical 

results as reported here. 

To assess the degree of regulatory elaboration, I operationalized the second 

dependent variable in this study as the number of amendments passed. Amendments to 

the law such as renumbering or making cosmetic changes to the entire code are 

excluded from the analysis. Any states that had not passed an organic food law are 

also excluded from the analysis. Given the large amount of zeros present in the data, I 

use a zero-inflated negative binomial model using the zinb estimation procedure in 

Stata 9. Because there are multiple observations for the same state in the analysis, I 



 

75 

correct for the possible violation of independence among observations by calculating 

the standard errors of coefficient estimates using a robust clustering technique, 

clustering on state (White 1982). Both dependent variables are updated annually to 

account for any change in laws. 

Independent Variables. The primary independent variables of interest are the type and 

presence of SBCOs. For data on certification organizations, I consulted multiple 

sources. For a yearly compilation of all certification organizations in existence in the 

United States, I drew from the National Organic Directory (NOD; 1983–1984, 1986–

2001), published by the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. I also consulted 

three additional directories14 to capture all certification organizations that existed prior 

to their listing in the NOD. If directories did not list a founding date for the 

certification organization, calls were made to the organization to obtain it. If the 

organization had been dissolved, I contacted affiliated farmers or organizations to 

obtain both a founding date and a dissolution date for the particular organization. 

Based on these data-gathering techniques, I am confident that I captured all 

certification organizations that had existed during our observation period. To indicate 

the presence of a local nonprofit SBCO in any given state-year, I simply use a 

dichotomous variable (1 present, 0 absent).  

Control Variables. To rule out alternative explanations for inertia and elaboration, I 

control for a host of variables that may influence these legal dynamics. First, I control 

for a number of agricultural-related measures such as the total number of farms in a 

state (logged) (Number of farms), the change in the number of farms (Change # 

farms), and the percentage of state GSP that is generated through agriculture (Farm 

revenue/GSP). I also control for the degree to which a state’s agricultural production is 

concentrated in larger farms (Farmland/farms). For this measure, I divide the total 

                                                 
14 One published by the Organic Farming Research Foundation, another by the Agricultural Marketing 
Service of the USDA, and the third by ATTRA (Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas). 



 

76 

amount of agricultural farmland in a state by the total number of farms. These data 

come from the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the United States 

Department of Agriculture. 

I also control for state SBCOs (State SBCO) because they spawned many 

amendments as they adapted legal and regulatory structure to better suit their needs. I 

also control for the number of organic wholesalers (Wholesalers) given that they had 

substantial interest in the governance arrangements of the industry and played a key 

brokerage function between farms and retail outlets in the marketing channels of 

organic food.15 Given that the broader public may influence law passage, I include a 

control for the percentage of liberal voters in a state (Liberal voters). This measure 

comes from Wright, Erikson, and McIver (1985) and is a time-invariant measure 

culled from 76,000 respondents to CBS News–New York Times polls at the state level 

between 1974 and 1982.  

I also control for party strength at the state legislative level. Political scientists 

have shown that party strength can facilitate or impede the passage of particular kinds 

of laws (Brown 1995; Peterson 1995). Because the organic food movement was 

aligned with environmental and counterculture movements in the 1960s and 1970s, I 

control for the degree to which Democrats control state legislatures (Percent 

democrat). Because the percentage of senate seats occupied by Democrats is highly 

collinear with the percentage of house seats occupied by Democrats (.88), I include the 

                                                 
15 These data are from the NOD and Foods Co-ops: An Alternative to Shopping in Supermarkets (Ronco 
1975), both of which list wholesalers that sell natural and organically grown or produced food. The 
NOD provides the most comprehensive listing of all wholesalers carrying organically produced food 
from 1983 to 1984 and from 1986 to 2000. Foods Co-ops was published in 1975. To develop a 
longitudinal variable from these two sources that would cover the length of our observation period, I 
first established that the two sources were similar. I compared the 1983 wholesaler data from the NOD 
with the 1974 Food Co-ops data. I found a .86 correlation between the two data sources. I then 
interpolated the NOD data and compared the interpolated 1974 NOD data with the 1974 Food Co-ops 
data and found a .75 correlation. Based on these correlations, I combined the Food Co-ops and the NOD 
data and linearly interpolated and extrapolated to generate values for the missing years of data. 



 

77 

percentage for the Senate. These data were collected from the Statistical Abstract of 

the United States. 

I also include a measure of the cumulative number of laws passed (# states 

w/law) to control for broader institutional processes of mimicry and learning 

(Haveman 1993; Haunschild and Miner 1997; Strang and Soule 1998). Finally, in the 

analysis of legal variation, I include the number of amendments passed (Amendments). 

I also control for the proportion of states in each state’s agricultural region that have 

passed an organic food law (% regional states w/law). To construct this variable, I rely 

on the USDA-designated farm regions. All variables in all analyses were lagged one 

year. 

RESULTS 

To evaluate hypothesis 1, that regulatory inertia occurs during the early period 

of industry law and regulatory elaboration occurs in a later period, I draw attention to 

Figures 2.1 and 2.2, which plot the number of laws and amendments passed over the 

time period of the study and show box plots of similarity scores for the years 1979 to 

2000, respectively. Figure 2.1 reveals, consistent with predictions from institutional 

theory (if one simply considers a 1/0 adopt/not adopted dichotomy), a global trend of 

institutionalization within the industry with regard to state law. Looking at the entire 

United States, law passage followed a typical “s-curve” that characterizes most 

diffusion patterns. The same table shows the cumulative number of amendments 

passed over the same time period. As law passage slows down in the early 1990s, 

amendments, which were well below 10 in the first 20 years of the observation period, 

increase monotonically over the course of the last 10 years of the observation period. 

This pattern suggests that regulatory elaboration did indeed occur in the latter period 

of the study. Once a “basic” law was in place, states tended to amend their respective 



 

78 

laws in the later period of the study, elaborating and expanding institutional structure 

and control mechanisms.  

With regard to regulatory inertia, Table 2.1 lists all states that passed a law 

without ever amending it. As demonstrated, only one (Massachusetts) of the first five 

states to pass an organic food law never amended it. In contrast to Grattet et al.’s 

(1998) prediction that regulatory inertia would occur early on in the period of law 

passage, 64 percent of exclusive law passage (as they defined it) occurs in the last 

third of the observation period; 93 percent of exclusive law passage occurs in the last 

half of the observation period.  

TABLE 2.1: STATES PASSING A LAW AND 
NO SUBSEQUENT AMENDMENTS  

State Year
Massachusetts 1978
Nebraska 1986
South Dakota 1988
Wisconsin 1988
Ohio 1989
Rhode Island 1990
Vermont 1990
Virginia 1990
Indiana 1993
North Carolina 1993
Pennsylvania 1994
Georgia 2000
Michigan 2000
Missouri 2000
Mean=1991; s.d.=6.1 years 

 

Employing the similarity index, Figure 2.2 provides an alternative perspective 

on inertia. Defining inertia as deviation from the yearly mean of similarity, a different 

pattern emerges.  

Box plots are particularly useful for exploring questions of variation because 

they provide information about the median, the interquartile range (capturing the 



 

79 

middle 50% of the values), the extreme values within 3/2*IQR, and outliers that lie 1.5 

times beyond the IQR. As apparent in Figure 2.2, the IQR from 197916 to 1987 is quite 

large, suggesting a fair amount of variation within those yearly averages of the 

similarity score. For instance, in 1979, Massachusetts and Connecticut had scores of 

.31 and .30, respectively, whereas Maine and California were much more similar to 

the Oregon 1973 law, with similarity scores of .62 and .56, respectively. The median 

score sinks dramatically in 1985 with laws in New Hampshire and Washington 

differing radically from the other existing laws at the time. Between 1987 and 1990, 

the median score again falls substantially. From 1990 on, the national mean similarity 

score varies little, with a high in 1992 of .265 to a low of .231 by 2000. While the IQR 

is getting smaller, the whiskers become elongated over time and outliers appear, 

suggesting that while the majority of states are converging within the IQR, there are 

others that are introducing variation in two ways. First, consistent with the mechanism 

of regulatory inertia, variation enters through the passage of a law that is similar to 

Oregon 1973 but is never amended (represented by the upper whiskers and outliers in 

Figure 2.2), despite ongoing change to the national mean similarity measure. Second, 

heterogeneity may enter through the passage of a law (represented by the lower 

whiskers and outlier in Figure 2.2) that diverges significantly from OR 1973 and from 

the yearly mean. It should also be noted that the majority of states that pass 

amendments fall within the IQR (59% are passed by states that fall within the IQR; 

13% are passed by states below the 25th percentile; 29% are passed by states with 

similarity scores above the 75th percentile).  

From these graphical analyses, I conclude that hypothesis 1 is partially 

supported. Regulatory inertia certainly exists in state-level organic food regulation, but 

it does not necessarily occur in the early period of the observation window as it did in 

                                                 
16 There is no box plot shown for 1978 because Massachusetts and Oregon were the only states that had 
any organic regulation to that point. In 1978, Massachusetts has a similarity score of .18.  



 

80 

the context of hate crime legislation. With regard to regulatory elaboration, there is 

evidence that individual states are expanding their laws in the later period of law 

passage, but the states passing amendments generally fall within the yearly IQR, 

suggesting that regulatory elaboration occurs for states but that regulatory elaboration 

does not necessarily result in greater legal variation.  

 

FIGURE 2.2: BOXPLOTS OF SIMILARITY SCORES, BY YEAR 

I now turn to the remaining hypotheses that consider the impact of SBCOs on 

regulatory elaboration and regulatory inertia. Tables 2.2 and 2.3 report the descriptive 

statistics and correlations between the variables used in the analyses. Table 2.4 

presents the results of the legal variation analysis. It should be reiterated here that the 

dependent variable is the absolute value of the similarity score of each state in year t 

less the mean similarity score for year t. In other words, a high value is equivalent to 

20001999 1998 1997 1996 1995 19941993199219911990198919881987198619851984198319821981 1980 1979 
Year

0.4000 

0.2000 

0.0000 

Si
m

ila
ri

ty



 

81 

deviation in either direction from the mean for that year. Model 1 contains the control 

variables. States with state SBCOs are less likely to deviate from yearly national mean 

similarity scores. This is also true of states with higher percentages of Democrats in 

the senate and greater numbers of wholesalers. As the number of organic food laws 

increase, individual states’ laws are less likely to diverge from the mean similarity 

measure, suggesting general convergence. By contrast, states with larger farms 

(Farmland/farms) are more likely to have laws that deviate from the yearly mean. This 

holds true for states located in farm regions that have higher percentages of states that 

have passed laws previously.  

Model 2 adds the SBCO variables. Consistent with hypothesis 2b, states with 

local nonprofit SBCOs are less likely to have laws that deviate from the national mean 

for year t, although this variable is marginally significant. However, hypothesis 3b is 

strongly supported, with OCIA, the federated SBCO, leading to increased variation 

from the national mean for year t. These findings support the contention that SBCO 

infrastructure significantly influences the dynamics of legal variation across time and 

space.  

Table 2.5 presents the results from the analysis total amendments. Model 3 

contains the control variables. In this analysis, state SBCOs and states with greater 

numbers of wholesalers are more likely to pass amendments. It should be noted that 

these two variables positively predict regulatory elaboration and negatively predict 

deviations from the national yearly mean of similarity. This suggests that in states 

where state SBCOs operate and where there are greater numbers of wholesalers, there 

will be greater regulatory elaboration and greater congruence with these states’ laws 

and the national yearly similarity average. This makes sense given that the state uses 

its legislative and regulative machinery to operate its state SBCO. Wholesalers, as 

critical linking pins between SBCOs and consumer markets, encouraged greater 



 

82 

regulation as key brokers who sought to decrease information asymmetries regarding 

product quality and to decrease coordination costs across state boundaries through 

streamlining certification and regulation. 

Model 4 includes the SBCO variables. Hypotheses 2a and 3a are both 

supported, with local nonprofit SBCOs being strong predictors of legal amendments 

and OCIA being a strong negative predictor of legal amendments.  

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 

The purpose of this paper was to shed light on how legal dynamics within one 

industry context unfold over time and across polities. While recent work has made 

significant gains in understanding how and under what conditions political and 

institutional factors influence the passage (and repeal) of state laws, questions of legal 

variation and other important legal dynamics such as amendment processes have been 

largely neglected. Nonetheless, an “appreciation of heterogeneity and the relative 

incoherence of fields is crucial . . . for empirical explorations of institutional change” 

(Schneiberg and Clemens 2006:210). 
 



 

 

83

 

 

 

 

TABLE 2.2: DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS AND CORRELATIONS FOR REGULATORY INERTIA ANALYSIS 

Variable Mean 
Std. 
Dev. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 

1. Similarity .10 .08              

2. State SBCO .30 .46 -.23             

3. Percent Democrat .55 .15 .02 .07            

4. Wholesalers 6.49 17.74 -.12 -.09 -.02           

5. Change # farms 14.22 1454.47 .01 .14 -.03 .07          

6. Farm revenue/GSP .02 .03 -.08 -.19 -.28 -.07 -.17         

7. Farmland/farms .66 .84 -.02 .03 -.25 -.07 -.01 .26        

8. Change in acres -100.00 438.67 .03 .06 .12 -.10 .21 -.02 -.19       

9. Number of farms (ln) 10.01 1.41 -.01 -.03 -.08 .23 .07 .33 -.13 -.04      

10. # states w/law 27.68 8.77 -.09 .27 -.16 .02 .07 -.01 .11 -.02 .10     

11. % regional states w/law .63 .19 -.11 .28 -.15 .16 .19 .09 .12 -.02 .10 .59    

12. Amendments .13 .40 -.10 .26 -.02 .10 .11 -.07 .00 -.07 .04 .04 .16   

13. Local nonprofit SBCO .46 .50 .18 -.40 .10 .24 -.02 -.37 -.45 .06 .03 -.20 -.24 .01  

14. OCIA .33 .47 .02 -.30 -.22 .04 -.11 .46 .22 -.08 .40 .21 .08 -.12 -.06 



 

 

84

 

 

 

TABLE 2.3: DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS AND CORRELATIONS FOR REGULATORY ELABORATION ANALYSIS 

Variable Mean 
Std. 
Dev. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 

1. Amendments .74 3.33              

2. State SBCO .30 .46 .22             

3. Liberal voters 20.45 4.14 .02 -.11            

4. Percent Democrat .55 .15 .05 .07 .31           

5. Wholesalers 6.90 17.93 .03 -.10 .26 -.02          

6. Change # farms 43.99 1448.54 .07 .13 -.07 -.03 .07         

7. Farm revenue/GSP .02 .02 -.01 -.19 -.49 -.27 -.08 -.15        

8. Farmland/farms .64 .80 .07 .05 -.14 -.25 -.07 .00 .27       

9. Change in acres -98.85 443.35 -.05 .06 .01 .12 -.09 .23 -.01 -.20      

10. Number of farms (ln) 10.03 1.37 .02 -.03 -.30 -.10 .24 .08 .33 -.11 -.03     

11. # states w/law 27.55 9.20 .03 .29 -.23 -.17 .03 .04 .02 .12 -.01 .08    

12. % regional states w/law .63 .19 .04 .26 -.20 -.16 .17 .19 .11 .13 -.02 .11 .61   

13. Local nonprofit SBCO .49 .50 -.03 -.46 .39 .10 .23 -.04 -.36 -.45 .06 .04 -.27 -.25  

14. OCIA .32 .47 -.06 -.28 -.18 -.22 .03 -.16 .51 .25 -.09 .38 .21 .06 -.11 



 

85 

TABLE 2.4: REGULATORY INERTIA ANALYSIS, BY STATE (GENERALIZED 
LEAST SQUARES FIXED EFFECTS REGRESSION MODELS) 
   
Variable Model 1 Model 2 
   
State SBCO -.025** -.028** 
 (.008) (.008) 
Percent Democrat -.091** -.083** 
 (.031) (.031) 
Wholesalers -.001** -.001** 
 (.000) (.000) 
Change # farms .000 .000 
 (.000) (.000) 
Farm revenue/GSP .325 .371 
 (.234) (.232) 
Farmland/farms .083** .077** 
 (.024) (.024) 
Change in acres .000 .000 
 (.000) (.000) 
Number of farms (ln) .004 .021 
 (.045) (.045) 
# states w/law -.002** -.002** 
 (.000) (.000) 
% regional states w/law .119** .123** 
 (.028) (.028) 
Amendments -.001 .000 
 (.005) (.005) 
Local nonprofit SBCO  -.013+ 
  (.007) 
OCIA   .020** 
  (.007) 
Constant .038 -.130 
 (.465) (.465) 
Observations 419 419 
Number of states 35 35 
R-squared .17 .19 
Standard errors in brackets.  
Note: Liberal voters variable dropped due to time invariance. 
+ significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1% 



 

86 

 

TABLE 2.5: REGULATORY ELABORATION ANALYSIS, COUNT OF 
AMENDMENTS, BY STATE (ZERO-INFLATED NEGATIVE BINOMIAL 
MODELS) 
   
Variable Model 3 Model 4 
   
State SBCO 3.190** 4.576** 
 (.504) (.831) 
Liberal voters .027 .016 
 (.090) (.077) 
Percent Democrat 1.401 1.481 
 (2.138) (2.298) 
Wholesalers .025** .022* 
 (.009) (.009) 
Change # farms .000 .000* 
 (.000) (.000) 
Farm revenue/GSP 18.43 58.883** 
 (15.926) (15.131) 
Farmland/farms -.119 .696* 
 (.226) (.286) 
Change in acres -.001** -.001** 
 (.000) (.000) 
Number of farms (ln) -.081 -.037 
 (.301) (.300) 
# states w/law -.099* -.026 
 (.039) (.044) 
% regional states w/law 2.859 -.112 
 (2.393) (1.935) 
Local nonprofit SBCO  3.321** 
  (.804) 
OCIA   -1.662* 
  (.695) 
   
Constant -2.246 -5.961+ 
 (3.260) (3.401) 
Log pseudo likelihood -237.654 -231.565 
Wald test Χ2 52.43 64.82 
Degrees of freedom 11 13 
Note: n=411. Robust standard errors in parentheses. 
+ significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1% 



 

87 

Moving beyond dichotomous conceptualizations of industry legal 

infrastructure by focusing on processes that generate variation in legal content and 

amendments to preexisting laws, I have sought to provide a broader conceptualization 

of regulatory evolution, opening theoretical and empirical opportunities to more fully 

understand institutional change. To do this, I have modified explanations of two key 

processes that work against homogenization of legal structure—regulatory inertia and 

regulatory elaboration (Grattet et al. 1998). In the context of the U.S. organic food 

industry, I found evidence of regulatory elaboration (amendments) occurring in the 

later period of law passage. However, states passing amendments were generally 

within the yearly inter-quartile range of the similarity index (see Figure 2.2), 

suggesting that while an individual state’s domain or jurisdiction over the organic 

industry expanded at the state level, such expansion did not necessarily translate into 

greater overall legal variation. In contrast, regulatory inertia contributed significantly 

to overall legal heterogeneity in the context of organic food law. However, in contrast 

to the findings of a study of U.S. hate crime legislation (Grattet et al. 1998), I found 

that regulatory inertia was not confined to the early period of the observation period. 

Rather, regulatory inertia—as measured as the passage of a single law with no 

subsequent amendments—occurred primarily in the later period of legal structuration 

in the organic food industry. I also found that inertia measured as deviation from a 

yearly similarity score occurred in two ways. First, some states passed laws and never 

amended them, even as the overall mean similarity index decreased over time (as 

illustrated in Figure 2.2 by the upper whiskers and outliers of the box plots). Second, 

other states passed laws that were even less similar than the overall mean similarity 

index was to the baseline Oregon 1973 law (the lower whiskers and outlier of the box 

plots shown in Figure 2.2). For example, a number of states, late in the observation 

period, passed laws that consisted of a single provision (i.e., Maryland, 1990; North 



 

88 

Carolina, 1993; Missouri, 2000). Thus, while regulatory inertia occurred in this 

context, it did not occur in the early period of the observation window as suggested by 

Grattet et al., nor was it confined to states that passed a single law and never amended 

it.  

A second and more consequential modification of Grattet et al.’s (1998) study 

is that while the authors conclude that “the content of a state’s law is contingent upon 

when it enters the ongoing institutionalization process” (p. 303), I have shown that 

intra-industry governance organizations also significantly influence processes of 

regulatory inertia and elaboration. This approach, which focuses on the role of 

interests and preexisting industry-governance infrastructure in generating legal-content 

variation, has the potential to inform questions of which legal principles and 

configurations of provisions are produced and which come to dominate an industry 

(Edelman and Stryker 2005).  

Focusing on local nonprofit SBCOs and the federated SBCO OCIA, I found 

that the presence of a local nonprofit SBCO in a state predicts significant regulatory 

elaboration in terms of amendments to existing legal structure, whereas the presence 

of an OCIA chapter negatively predicts amendments. In terms of regulatory inertia, 

states dominated by local nonprofit SBCOs are less likely to have idiosyncratic laws 

when compared to the national mean similarity measure for each year. In contrast, the 

presence OCIA significantly predicts the presence of idiosyncratic laws. These 

findings contribute to existing literature in a number of ways.  

First, by examining the variation of content of laws, this study moves beyond 

extant conceptualizations of institutional change that tend to focus on a structurally 

deterministic, binary conceptualization of institutionalization to place emphasis on 

heterogeneity—an increasingly important element of institutional analysis, 

demonstrated by recent studies of institutional change and its effects (Schneiberg and 



 

89 

Bartley 2001; Sine, Haveman, and Tolbert 2005; Schneiberg and Clemens 2006). 

Focusing on the degree to which a particular state’s laws deviate from mean similarity 

scores across all states provides clues into the impact of institutional processes versus 

political processes in dictating the content, scope, and efficacy of industry regulation 

(Edelman and Stryker 2005). Greater precision in measuring this type of heterogeneity 

in institutional structure, coupled with greater attention to the location and relative 

power of various stakeholders within a particular organizational field, can provide a 

solid foundation for moving beyond institutional theory’s historical focus on the 

effects of institutions (Dacin, Goodstein, and Scott 2002) and toward a more robust 

examination of processes of institutional creation and transformation.  

Second, disaggregating organizational forms into more distinct categories 

allows for a more nuanced understanding of the differential impact of seemingly 

similar forms on broader field-level institutions and relations. Recent work in social 

movement theory has transcended the dichotomy of viewing organizational structure 

as either suppressing mobilization capacity (i.e., Michels 1962; Piven and Cloward 

1979; Rothschild and Whitt 1986) or facilitating it (McCarthy and Zald 1977) to 

examine more carefully how organizational attributes influence the ability to mobilize 

(see Clemens and Minkoff 2004; Edwards and McCarthy 2004:136–138). For 

example, Edwards and McCarthy note, “The choice of organizational form can have 

direct implications for the ability of an ongoing SMO to build the organizational 

capacity for certain types of collective action, such as grass-roots mobilization and 

litigation” (2004:137–138). Clemens and Minkoff echo that idea, “Rather than being 

homogenized as a ‘resource,’ particular organizations sustain distinctive cultures of 

interaction and shape trajectories of mobilization. The answer to ‘how shall we 

organize?’ (Clemens 1996) proves to be consequential for the development of actors 

as activists and the prospects for organized political action” (2004:157). They further 



 

90 

note that “distinctive styles of organizing also make activism attractive to different 

potential activists” (2004:157), suggesting that organizational form can influence who 

becomes members of one organization and not another.  

While SBCOs are not social movement organizations, local nonprofit SBCOs 

exhibited tendencies similar to those of SMOs. As such, in this study, I attempted to 

differentiate the capacity of local nonprofit certification organizations from that of a 

federated SBCO. While future research must more fully explicate the differential 

impact of organizational capacity from underlying motivations and scope of focus 

regarding legislative outcomes, this study nonetheless show clear differences in 

institutional outcomes for different types of SBCOs. More research that appreciates 

the role of organizational variety or heterogeneity in generating differential 

institutional outcomes is needed to validate and corroborate the findings in this study.  

 



 

91 

APPENDIX A:  
CODING SHEET FOR ORGANIC FOOD LAWS AND AMENDMENTS 

Provisions 

organic is defined 
organic is defined as certified organic 
certification is defined 
Producer is defined 
Producer must register with state 
Processor must register with state 
Handler must register with state 
Producer is certified by state 
Regulation of materials 
Approaches to regulation 
certifier has a Materials List for generic materials 
certifier emphasizes avoiding prohibited practices/materials, not soil building or other `positive' goals 
Materials for crop production 
Raw manure: required interval after use before crop can be harvested 
Fungicide-treated seed is prohibited or regulated 
Treated seed okay if organic is unavailable 
Non-certified annual seedlings prohibited 
Use of GEO/GMO materials prohibited 
Use of GEO/GMO derivatives prohibited 
Biosolids (sewage sludge) prohibited 
Irradiation prohibited 
Sprouts 
Organic crop management 
requires recordkeeping 
designates the number of years records must be kept 
state officials have access to a producer/processor's etc. records, land, warehouses, etc. 
Organic plan required 
plan submitted annually 
on-site inspection at least annually 
Crop rotation required for annual plants 
time between pesticide and harvest 
time between fertilizer and harvest 
`Transitional organic' product labeling is permitted 
Soil nutrient test is required for certification 
Soil residue test is required for certification 
the FDA or EPA % of minimum pesticide residues allowable 
prohibits the commingling of organic and conventionally grown products 
`Parallel production' is allowed, if additional record keeping/organizational requirements are met 
Rotating fields in and out of organic production (even with full transition time) is prohibited 
When irrigating, operator must practice water conservation 
Certification program management 
General points 



 

92 

Provisions 

affidavits are mentioned as legitimate means of verification 
Annual renewal of certification 
Annual inspection of operation 
state performs unannounced second inspection on all first-time applicants 
state performs unannounced inspections on a random set of recertifying operators 
state reserves the right to make unannounced inspections at any time 
state will investigate reasonable reports of violations 
certified operator can appeal decertification decision 
Unintentional contamination 
Buffer zone requirements (space separation, physical barriers, runoff diversion) 
Operator must test irrigation water regularly for contamination by organically prohibited materials 
Regular residue tests required for soil 
Regular residue tests required for crops 
Allowable residue level for residues in produce 
Crop with residues over allowed limit can never be labeled `certified organic', regardless of reason 
Consequences of drift of prohibited materials on to certified crops or land, when drift is not due to fault of certified 
operator 
Crop cannot be labeled `organic', regardless of amount of drift 
Affected land is automatically decertified, regardless of the amount of drift 
Enforcement procedures 
Organic plan emphasized as enforcement tool 
Audit trail emphasized as enforcement tool (not just for animals) 
Medical records for individual animals (or flocks, for fowl) must be traceable through life cycle 
Animals must be individually identified on body by physical marker or tag (except fowl) 
Record keeping system must be adequate to ensure products of treated animals are not labeled organic 
Animals treated with prohibited materials must be identified on body of animal (with tag, etc.) to ensure no 
confusion (except fowl) 
Organic Processing 
Processors must keep records/time 
Audit Trail 
Product guidelines by labeling category 
`Organic' on principal display panel (PDP) requires 95±100% organic ingredients 
Requires a different percentage 
`Made with organic' (MWO) on PDP requires 50±95% organic ingredients 
Requires 70±95% organic ingredients 
Products with some organic ingredients, but not enough to make the `MWO' cutoff, can say `contains organic 
[ingredients]' on information panel 
Organic ingredients cannot be identified if entire product does not meet criteria for `organic' label 
certification of processing is required for `organic [product]' and `MWO [ingredients]' label claims 
certification of processing is required even if labeling only identifies organic ingredients on side panel 
Product composition 
For `organic' and `MWO' products: 
Non-agricultural ingredients should be minimized 
certifier encourages using 100% organic ingredients, or requires preferential use of organic ingredients 
Genetically engineered ingredients are prohibited 
Irradiated ingredients are prohibited 



 

93 

Provisions 

Nutritional quality should be preserved in processing 
This is emphasized in processing section, not just in principles of organic production 
certifier allows an expanded set of non-agricultural ingredients in `MWO' products 
certifier allows any ingredient to be used in `COI' products that are certified organically processed 
Processors making only `COI' products are exempted from some non-composition requirements 
Facility management 
Organic plan is required 
`Parallel production' is allowed, if additional record keeping/organizational requirements are met 
Procedures to ensure organic integrity 
HACCP or similar system involving critical control points 
ISO 9000 series certification 
Extra withdrawal time required after fumigation with a prohibited material 
Regular or required residue testing of products 
certifier can test for residues if reason for suspicion 
`Ecologically sound' waste management plan 
Producer must minimize packaging 
Handling regulations (and defined) 
Must be licensed with state 
retailer not considered a handler 
Retailer must keep records =2 if handler, =1 if retailer 
year records must be kept by retailers 
Requires retailers to maintain audit trail 
certifier has detailed description of requirements for non-processor handlers 
Handlers dealing in only MWO or COI products are subject to less restrictive standards 
Handlers are subject to less restrictive standards or a less thorough certification and inspection process, if organic 
sales are below a specified level 
With each transaction in supply chain, both buyer and seller (if certified) must record transaction, date, and volume 
exchanged 
All processors and handlers must maintain audit trail sufficient to track raw materials from supplier to retail 
On-farm processors must meet all processing standards 
Organic labeling guidelines 
Processed and unprocessed products labeled `organic' 
Label is required to be sold as organic 
When two products come from two different cert orgs., must have both names on label 
mandates the creation of a state organic label (e.g. Montana Certified Organic) 
if the product is labeled as organic, it meets the state code 
certifier must pre-approve entire label 
Label on retail item must identify certifier of the final handler or distributor of product 
certifier contact information is required on retail item 
In multi-ingredient products, listing same ingredient from organic and non-organic sources is prohibited 
In multi-ingredient products, listing an ingredient as `organic when available' is prohibited 
if less than all of the ingredients are not organic, then not organic 
All products labeled `organic' 
"organic when available" label not acceptable 
Producers name/address on the label 
`Transitional' product labeling 



 

94 

Provisions 

Transitional product certifiable 
Transitional product can use same logo as certified organic 
Label, seal, or statement contains the word `organic' 
Labeling through distribution chain: 
`Organic' required on invoice 
`Organic' required on non-retail container (box, bin, case, pallet) 
certifier ID required on invoice 
certifier ID required on non-retail container (box, bin, case, pallet) 
provides other cert. , in addition to `organic' or `transitional' 
Seal is a registered trademark 
Statements on packaged multi-ingredient foods 
For products labeled `organic' on PDP: 
certifier name may appear on PDP 
certifier logo may appear on PDP 
certifier name may appear on label 
certifier logo may appear on label 
`Organic' must be smaller than product ID 
Individual id. of organic ingredients on info panel 
Statement of percent organic ingredients 
Organizational structure 
Program is self-sufficient in funding 
State programs: program has advisory board 
the dept of ag. is an organic certifier 
dept of ag contracts out cert. to a private entity 
dept. of ag sets certification procedures/organic regulations 
certifier is licensed, authorized, or approved in some way be state(s) in which it operates 
Advisory board is mandated by statute 
number of people on board 
board producer 
board processor 
board handler 
board environmentalist 
board technical 
board state ag/extension 
Consumer rep 
retailer 
misc. board 
Board has input in standards decisions 
Board has final decisions for standards 
Board has input in de/certification decisions 
Board has final decision for de/certification 
designates the composition of that board 
creates a fund especially for organic 
creates avenue for complaints to be heard 
Interactions with other certifiers and national bodies 



 

95 

Provisions 

Standards state intent to create reciprocity agreements 
STATE POWERS 
provision outlining mislabeling as unlawful 
Unlawful to certify in violation of statute 
Unlawful to produce, handle, or process organic food unless registered with state 
Unlawful to make a false statement 
Unlawful to forge, falsify, fail to obtain, retain, disclose records 
unlawful to advertise label, or represent that fertilizer or pesticide may be used when it is a prohibited substance 
Unlawful to commingle 
whether or not the law stipulates a fine for any unlawful activity 
amount of fine specified 
type of fine specified 
unintentional fine 
the use of an injunction 
revoke the certification status of a producer 
revoke the certification status of a processor 
allows the state to revoke the license of a handler 
revoke registration of a cert. organization 
issue stop sale order 
issue a cease and desist order 
bans a certifier to certify his/her own farm 
Relation between state and cert. orgs. 
certification organizations must register with the state 
Conflict of interest provision 
certification represents compliance with the law 
out of state certification must meet WA standards 
Annual fee 
specifies qualities of a cert org (expertise, no. of personnel, etc.) 
specifies provisions for certification organizations. 
 



 

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PAPER 3:  
CERTIFYING THE HARVEST:  

THE ROLE OF STANDARDS-BASED CERTIFICATION ORGANIZATIONS IN 
THE ORGANIC FOOD INDUSTRY 

INTRODUCTION 

Traditional economic explanations conceptualize the origins of markets as 

unproblematic and as a given. Arrow (1974), for example, states, “Although we are 

not usually explicit about it, we really postulate that when a market could be created, it 

would be” (quoted in Sarasvathy and Dew 2005:533–534). Williamson (1985) 

similarly reflects an uncritical attitude toward the origins of markets by stating, “In the 

beginning, there were markets” (p. 87). More recent work in historical economics 

suggests that “institutions organically emerge in the initial stages of market 

development as unintended and unforeseeable results from the pursuit of individual 

interests” (Greif 2005:728). The underlying assumptions of these quotes are that 

markets emerge through atomized market behavior, that entrepreneurs engage in 

optimal decision making, and that consumers have well-defined preferences. 

Economic sociologists, organization theorists, and strategists have challenged these 

assumptions, emphasizing the collective, political, and often unintended nature of 

processes associated with new market emergence. A growing number of scholars 

acknowledge the significant amount of “institutional work” needed to lessen 

uncertainty and ambiguity to an acceptable level before a market can be established 

and grow (Zucker 1986; Fligstein 1996; Garud, Jain, and Kumaraswamy 2002; 

Stinchcombe 2002; Rao 2004).  

Recent work in organization theory underscores the importance of institutional 

entrepreneurs in the creation of new institutions and industries. To date, research in 

this vein has focused on delineating the processes and strategies by which institutional 

entrepreneurs are able to embed new “beliefs, norms and values into social structures” 



 

104 

and precipitate institutional change (Rao, Morrill, and Zald 2000:240). Much of this 

research is grounded in social movement theory (See McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 

1996), focusing on key processes including the identification of political opportunities, 

appropriate framing and theorization of problems and solutions, and mobilization of 

key constituencies. Studies of institutional entrepreneurship highlight the skill of 

institutional entrepreneurs in forging new institutions in the face of existing ones 

(Fligstein 1997). For example, activities such as “demonstration events” sponsored by 

supporters of new technologies allow potential consumers to gain firsthand experience 

with radically new technologies to assess their utility, reliability, and validity.1  

A central, yet understudied means by which institutional entrepreneurs 

mitigate concerns over legitimacy and uncertainty is through the creation and 

promulgation of standards (Garud et al. 2002). In the absence of support from key 

institutional actors (the state and the professions) that are often initially reluctant to 

endorse new/marginal economic practices and innovations that deviate too far from 

taken-for-granted ways of consumption and product use (Leblebici, Salancik, Copay, 

and King 1991), standards-based certification organizations2 (referred to hereafter as 

SBCOs) are often organized by interested actors who create and promulgate standards 

in an effort to supply market order. Like institutions that “make new labels, and the 

labels make new kinds of people” (Douglas 1986:108), standards and the 

organizations that promote them can wield tremendous classificatory power by 

providing “ontological closure” around a particular product definition (Pinch and 

Bijker 1987) and by allocating material and social resources to people and 

organizations based on criteria embodied in standards. Through the use of 

                                                 
1 Examples include the telephone (Fischer 1992), the bicycle (Smith 1973), and the automobile (Rao 
1994; 2004). 
2 By standards-based certification organizations, I refer to organizations whose primary purpose is to 
create and/or promote standards, verify the compliance of other organizations with those standards, and 
formally acknowledge that an organization has met the standards through the conferral of a 
certification, endorsement, or accreditation. 



 

105 

measurement, recording, and ranking processes, new social entities are brought into 

existence (Espeland and Stevens 1998).  

Given the potential for standards to channel behavior, some scholars suggest 

they be placed on equal footing with markets and hierarchies because of their ability to 

facilitate contact, coordination, and anonymous market exchange (Brunsson 2000). 

Yet, standardization has been largely neglected by the social sciences when compared 

with other sources of order such as the state, markets and organization (Brunsson and 

Jacobsson 2000).  

In this paper, I respond to this call by examining how SBCOs structure and 

provide order in nascent market settings. Specifically, I seek to answer the following 

questions: How do SBCOs provide market order? How do the activities of SBCOs 

influence market entry and exit rates? While a significant body of literature has 

accumulated on the role of standards in technology fields,3 we know relatively little 

about the dynamics of standards in new nontechnological product markets in which 

the standards themselves are central to the value of the product they are purported to 

describe and evaluate (Espeland and Stevens 1998:338). In other words, these types of 

standards serve to differentiate otherwise identical products in a market. While there is 

no visible difference in the products or services provided, there are clear differences in 

the processes and inputs used in producing the good. For example, fair-trade coffee 

looks and tastes no different from conventional coffee. However, there is a price 

premium for fair-trade coffee because its value is derived from a set of standards that 

                                                 
3 Scholarly work on the role of technology standards has shown that common technological standards 
facilitate compatibility and interoperability between products or networks of products. These shared 
standards must emerge before firms can evaluate products and exchange in the marketplace (Garud et 
al. 2002). Significant work in economics and strategy has demonstrated how the creation of 
technological standards generates network externalities (Katz and Shapiro 1985; Farrell and Saloner 
1986). Technology standards can also lead to path dependence, irreversibility, and lock-in (David 1985; 
Arthur 1989). “Dominant design” is a closely related concept because it provides firms with the 
possibility of enjoying monopolistic control of the market (Utterback and Abernathy 1975; Tushman 
and Anderson 1986). For a recent review of this literature, see Quelin, Abdessemed, and Durand 2001. 



 

106 

requires importers to meet international criteria, pay a minimum price per pound for 

coffee, and provide credit and technical support to farmers.   

The U.S. organic food industry provides an ideal context to explore these 

research questions because, as is the case in a number of other product markets, the 

value of the product is derived from processes and inputs of the production rather than 

solely from the product itself.4 In recent years, organic agriculture has grown into a 

26-billion-dollar industry, making it the fastest growing sector in both U.S. and global 

agricultural markets. Although organic production accounts for less than .2 percent of 

U.S. agricultural output, it has posted a 21 percent yearly growth rate since 1997, and 

organic cropland has doubled over the same period.  

Despite such robust growth and the recent passage of federal regulations 

governing the industry, organic agriculture was marginalized for much of its history. 

In the early years, both market mechanisms and extant institutional structures failed to 

provide organic farmers with the stability and support necessary to grow beyond local 

and specialized niche markets. Because organic agricultural production uses no 

chemical fertilizer or pesticides and generally results in smaller yields and higher labor 

costs than conventional agriculture, organic production was seen by the majority of the 

American farming establishment and policymakers as unscientific and inefficient—a 

regression to agriculture of the 1930s. The logic of sustainability and ecology 

underlying organic food production was inconsistent with prevailing logics in 

conventional agriculture that centered on technology and efficiency. Being excluded 

from existing channels of access and having little assistance from agricultural market 

mechanisms, movement insiders mobilized resources to create and advocate a viable 

set of standards that differentiated organic production techniques and products from 

those of mainstream agriculture. Consequently, organic farmers, through the 

                                                 
4 Sustainable lumber and paper, green energy, “cruelty free” personal care products, bird-friendly 
coffee, and other fair-trade commodities all derive their value in this way. 



 

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development of standards, certification, and labeling processes, sowed the seeds for a 

movement/market that has quietly grown up in the shadow of conventional 

agribusiness and now dominates the sector in terms of growth.  

In the following section, I theoretically explore how standards and SBCOs 

structure markets and firm behavior, motivating my hypotheses concerning the 

relationship of SBCOs and their activities to market entry and exit. I then provide a 

brief historical narrative of the U.S. organic food industry, highlighting the important 

role of SBCOs in its success. Following this narrative, I present the analyses, results, 

and conclusion.  

THEORY AND HYPOTHESES 

Institutional entrepreneurs are organized actors that have an interest in 

particular institutional arrangements and who skillfully leverage resources (cultural, 

social, and material) to create new institutions or transform existing ones (DiMaggio 

1988; Fligstein 1997; Rao et al. 2000; Maguire, Hardy, and Lawrence 2004). Garud et 

al. (2002) outline key actions taken by institutional entrepreneurs:  

Institutional entrepreneurs create a whole new system of meaning that ties the 
functioning of disparate sets of institutions together . . . They define, 
legitimize, combat or co-opt rivals to succeed in their institutional 
projects . . . Assuming the role of champions, they energize efforts toward 
collective action and devise strategies for establishing stable sequences of 
interaction with other organizations to create entirely new industries and 
associated institutions. (pp. 196–197) 

Garud and colleagues point out that “the presence or absence of common 

standards impacts innovation within a technological field” (2002:198), implying that 

organizations that create and advocate standards in a particular field will likely 

influence the behavior of other organizations within that field. SBCOs can also 

accredit those same organizations, providing them with a possible buffer from 



 

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environmental selection pressures (Wiley and Zald 1968; Durand and McGuire 2005). 

A number of studies have considered how standards and/or certification processes 

influence well-established fields such as health care (Ruef and Scott 1998; Scott, Ruef, 

Mendel, and Caronna 2000), education (Wiley and Zald 1968; Zajac and Kraatz 1993; 

Casile and Davis-Blake 2002; Durand and McGuire 2005), nonprofits (Litwack and 

Hylton 1962; Singh, House, and Tucker 1986), and college sports (Stern 1981). Yet 

few studies have focused on how SBCOs influence firm entry and exit in nascent 

markets.  

I propose that SBCOs fulfill four roles critical to new market niche creation 

and growth. First, SBCOs create standards. Although SBCOs create standards for a 

variety of reasons (Brunsson 2000), I focus in this paper on the intentional use of 

standards to differentiate one product from another, with the explicit intent to create a 

market for that product. Second, SBCOs serve as advocates or evangelists 

(Stinchcombe 2001) of their standards, seeking to gain adherents. Third, once a firm 

has adopted standards, SBCOs exert normative control over it through verification 

processes to guarantee that standards are followed. Fourth, SBCOs provide an 

endorsement or certification to those organizations found in compliance with the 

standards promulgated.  

SBCOs and Standards Creation  

Sociologists have long been interested in the concept of market order. 

Durkheim explored the noncontractual aspects of contracts, and Weber examined the 

centrality of institutions and reputation in economic transactions. Contemporary 

sociologists have continued to examine the source and outcomes of market order in a 

vast array of settings.5 For example, scholars approaching industry and technology 

creation from a cultural/cognitive perspective (e.g., Pinch and Bijker 1987; Garud and 

                                                 
5 See Biggart and Beamish 2003 for a thorough review. 



 

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Rappa 1994; Porac, Ventresca, and Mishina 2002) begin with the premise that new 

products and services are not necessarily easily understood or commensurable. As 

such, “product ontologies” serve as cognitive understandings that concatenate product 

attributes, usage conditions, and buyer characteristics into a coherent bundle that 

clearly defines a product or service. This then allows the product or service to be 

exchanged in market transactions (Porac et al. 2002).  

Scholars from the Conventions School (Favereau 2002) provide a related, yet 

distinct, explanation of the origins of market ordering mechanisms. Sidestepping the 

market versus hierarchies question, Conventions School scholars focus on how 

individuals achieve economic coordination “via obedience to rules, norms, and 

intersubjectively mediated action of various forms” (Biggart and Beamish 2003:456). 

As such, economic coordination results from the interpretive and pragmatic actions of 

market actors to collectively determine with others how to handle uncertainty in 

particular situations. Bundles of conventions then become solutions to thorny market 

problems and these conventions have the propensity to congeal and become reified—

similar to institutions (Biggart and Beamish 2003). Solving these types of coordination 

problems is antecedent to the emergence and growth of new markets, technological 

regimes, products, and organizational forms (Leblebici et al. 1991; Garud and Rappa 

1994; Garud et al. 2002; Schneiberg 2002). 

Formal standards can embody product ontologies and generate conventions 

that provide the needed structure, coherence, and meaning to products, actors, and 

actions in new market arenas. By formal, I mean “the development of an abstraction of 

a large amount of concrete data, arrived at in such a way that further social action is 

governed by that abstraction, without in general going back to the original data” 

(Stinchcombe 2001:3). For example, having a blueprint that is approved by a client 

eliminates the necessity of continually returning to the client for her approval 



 

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regarding design preferences at each significant stage in the building process 

(Stinchcombe 2001). When formalization works well, its purpose is the same as the 

purpose of the substance on which it is based—a license to practice medicine is 

typically regarded as an appropriate reflection of a doctor’s knowledge and skill. As 

such, there is no need on the part of a new patient to “go behind” the abstraction (the 

doctor’s license to practice medicine) to examine the doctor’s educational and 

professional background.  

Ideally, for an abstraction to be continually effective in governing economic 

action, it should be  accurate (does not misdescribe the situation that is to be 

governed), economical (captures cleanly and orderly only that which is necessary to be 

easily understood), sufficient (it contains all aspects of a situation that are necessary 

for effective governance), and have sufficient scope (the range to which the 

abstraction system can be applied is wide enough for most situations that have to be 

acted upon to be included) (Stinchcombe 2001). While these conditions constitute an 

adequate system of abstraction, the system itself should also be communicable to those 

organizations or people that perform the relevant activities affiliated with the 

abstraction. To be communicable, a given abstraction should be able to be transmitted 

to, understood by, and believed by a receiver of the abstraction. Further, the 

abstraction, to be efficacious and not break down, must exhibit characteristics of 

transparency and durability.    

SBCOs and the Advocacy of Standards 

Standards not only need creators, they also need advocates. Unlike the state, 

standardizers have no coercive power to induce others to adopt their standards. Indeed, 

standards can be seen as “pieces of general advice offered to large numbers of 

potential adopters” (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000:2). Because standards are usually 

voluntary, standardizers must expend considerable effort to convince a target audience 



 

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of the need and benefits of adopting a particular standard. While an abstraction must 

be adequate and communicable, it must also be communicated.  

The need for advocacy of standards is particularly high in nascent 

markets/industries that rely on standards for the success of their radical new product. 

In the beginning of such markets, advocates of the products must make claims about 

the utility and desirability of the radical new product (Rao 2004); they must evangelize 

an understanding of what the product is, what it does, and why it is useful. In contrast 

to the conventional coercive, mimetic, and normative mechanisms that generate sets of 

similar organizations (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), evangelism is an alternative, yet 

effective, mechanism that explains how the “conversion” tactics of the evangelistic 

advocates spread a new form of organization (Stinchcombe 2002). 

SBCOs and Processes of Verification  

SBCOs not only increase and formalize advocacy efforts but also facilitate the 

adoption of standards through “enrolling” individuals or organizations. Once 

organizations enroll and adopt standards, they must often modify their organizational 

structures and activities, submit to information gathering, and allow on-site access to 

SBCOs, particularly if they want to receive continued SBCO endorsement. Continued 

and honest monitoring provides important “signals” (Spence 1973) for both the 

certifier and the certified. These signals cannot be entirely symbolic because audiences 

will soon begin to discount the signal if it does not adequately correspond to the 

underlying quality or characteristic it represents (Zucker 1986). However, if the 

abstraction remains consistent with the reality it represents, legitimacy accrues for 

both the abstraction as well as the concept behind it (e.g., “fair trade” becomes more 

cognitively legitimate with each additional wholesaler submitting to the prescribed 

standards and monitoring). Therefore, standardizers will be more successful in seeing 

their standards adopted if they create a formal organization of which other 



 

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organizations become members. Through this formal organization, standardizers can 

require members to adhere to their standards and can verify compliance through 

monitoring activities. Through these processes, voluntary standards begin to take on a 

rule-like character, which equates to power:  

Rule systems as important social technologies become resources and stakes in 
social interaction and the strategic structuring of social life. Thus, they cannot 
be viewed as simply “neutral” or “technical means” of realizing certain 
purposes . . . [They constitute] a power resource which social agents utilize in 
their struggles and negotiations over alternative structural forms and 
development of social systems, serving their interests. (Burns 1986:28–29) 

Through this power, SBCOs increase their ability to determine continuing 

membership, set additional rules, and pool resources for continued dissemination of 

standards and education of would-be adopters. This increased power can also lead to 

advantageous positioning to influence broader regulatory structures, create status 

differentiation among actors, and eclipse competing standards (Ahrne, Brunsson, and 

Garsten 2000).  

If a set of standards takes hold among a group of organizations, they have the 

propensity to generate commensuration—rendering two things equal (Espeland and 

Stevens 1998). For example, commensuration is achieved when a processor of tomato 

sauce can combine for processing organic tomatoes grown by multiple producers in 

multiple locations with confidence that all are grown according to the same principles 

and processes. Likewise, customers can be indifferent to the origin of the tomato or 

the idiosyncratic characteristics of the grower because the standard commensurates or 

renders one organic tomato equal to another. In the presence of standards and 

agreement on those standards (and consequently commensuration), the price 

mechanism can begin to operate, reflecting the quality of the product or service. It 

should be noted that commensuration can occur in markets in the absence of 

standards, but standards tend to increase a market’s durability.  



 

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As outlined above, SBCOs can play a key role in creating a fertile context for 

growth in new industries. First, by creating standards, they make claims about the 

nature and characteristics of a product. This activity is particularly important in 

markets where it is difficult to visually distinguish similar products from one another. 

Second, SBCOs act as institutional entrepreneurs by evangelizing standards and 

infusing them with value. Third, SBCOs exercise normative control over a firm once it 

adopts the SBCOs standards, and as more organizations adopt the standards, SBCOs 

gain increasing normative control over the field. Finally, through monitoring efforts, 

SBCOs maintain their own integrity and verify the claims of those they monitor. This 

results in increased legitimacy for both the individual firm and the concept that the 

standards represent. SBCOs serve as direct knowledge-diffusion mechanisms that help 

to establish the identity, legitimacy, and accountability of the new industry, the quality 

and value of its products and services, and the integrity and reliability of firms (Baum 

and Rao 2004).  

Although the mere presence of standards in a new industry could feasibly 

increase entry into a new market, I propose that SBCOs provide mechanisms of 

stability, control, and monitoring that encourage market entry in a way that standards 

alone cannot. When those espousing a set of standards create formal organizations, 

they increase the potency of their standards because they have more organizing 

instruments at their disposal to promulgate the standards and to influence the behavior 

of adopters (Arhne et al. 2000). Although it may be that not all players within a field 

adopt SBCO standards, actions taken by SBCOs generate legitimacy and reliability for 

a new market. As such, I hypothesize the following: 

 

Hypothesis 1: Greater numbers of SBCOs in a given geographic area will 

increase rates of market entry. 



 

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Endorsement/Certification 

An additional function of SBCOs is to provide a certification or endorsement 

that validates the claims a person or an organization makes. Past research has 

demonstrated the need for organizations to seek out endorsements from institutional 

actors (Singh, House, and Tucker 1986; Baum and Oliver 1991; Ruef and Scott 1998). 

Scott (1987) refers to this type of institutional mechanism as authorization. 

Authorization is the legitimation of the structural features or elements of an 

organizational form through legitimation by a superordinate unit. A key feature of this 

mechanism that distinguishes it from coercion is that the subordinate unit is “not 

compelled to conform but voluntarily seeks out the attention and approval of the 

authorizing agent” (Scott 1987:502). The ability to gain such endorsement increases 

flows of legitimacy, status, and access to resources and market channels. Following 

this logic, I hypothesize the following: 

 

Hypothesis 2: Having certification from an SBCO will decrease a firm’s 

likelihood of market exit.  

 

A centerpiece of social exchange theory is that actors’ reputations are 

constructed based in part on the reputations of their associates (Blau 1964). A 

significant amount of literature has demonstrated that status tends to flow across 

relationships (Merton 1973; Burt 1987; Podolny and Stuart 1995; Stuart, Hoang, and 

Hybels 1999). For example, Stuart et al. (1999) demonstrate that the prominence of a 

firm’s exchange partners influences the success of that firm. This idea is founded on 

the premise that resource holders will tend to value more highly the evaluations of a 

prominent actor because they implicitly assume that prominent actors are more likely 



 

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to discern quality under conditions of uncertainty than less prominent ones (see Stuart 

et al. 1999:319). Given this argument regarding status, I posit the following:  

 

Hypothesis 3: The greater the prominence of a certifier that certifies a firm, the 

less likely that firm will be to exit the market. 

 

Certification may also provide particular benefits to early entrants in a nascent 

industry. A wealth of literature has been generated around the concept of first-mover 

advantages (e.g., Lieberman and Montgomery 1988). Advantages include economic 

rents, market control, establishing switching costs, and channel control. While first-

mover advantages exist, evidence suggests that such advantages are moderated by a 

firm’s resources and capabilities (Szymanski, Troy, and Bharadwaj 1995). Third-party 

certification can be conceptualized as a key firm resource in new markets where 

unambiguous measures of quality are rare. Furthermore, there are benefits in terms of 

establishing credibility within a value chain if a firm’s products and services are third-

party certified. For example, wholesalers or other buyers in the value chain may 

require certification as a precondition for purchase. It is reasonable to believe that 

early entrants that are certified will be more likely to establish and maintain key 

transaction partners and, by extension, to remain longer in the market than firms that 

are not. Therefore, I propose the following:  

 

Hypothesis 4: Having certification from a third party will enhance the 

advantages of early entry and will decrease the likelihood of market exit. 

 

In addition to theorizing a direct effect of third-party certification on the 

likelihood of exit, I posit that benefits of certification will increase in the face of 



 

116 

increased competition. Population ecology has demonstrated that powerful selection 

mechanisms begin to operate as competition within an organizational population 

increases (Hannan and Freeman 1989). Under such a scenario, the ability for 

organizations to obtain scarce resources (and thus shelter themselves from strong 

selection forces) will increase their survival chances. Thus, certification can mitigate 

the effect of increasing competition. Hence,  

 

Hypothesis 5: Third party certification will moderate the effects of increased 

competition on organizational exit. 

CONTEXT 

The origin of the U.S. organic food industry has its roots in the early decades 

of the 20th century. A fringe group of scholars and farmers6 who believed that 

agriculture was better understood and practiced through biological and ecological 

principles, conducted experiments, compiled knowledge, and disseminated their 

findings. In the early 1940s, J. I. Rodale, a publisher-turned-organic farmer, purchased 

a farm in Pennsylvania and began farming according to the methods and practices of 

these early pioneers of organic agriculture. To complement his efforts on his 

experimental farm and to demonstrate the utility of organic methods, Rodale launched 

a magazine in 1942 through which readers shared their organic agriculture experiences 

(Rodale 1942:14) and subsequently published a number of highly influential books 

that became key sources of information for pioneering organic farmers. Rodale found 

little widespread success in the first 20 years of his efforts. However, his vision of a 

radically different food system gained greater momentum as broader movements 

                                                 
6 Among the most prominent pioneers and writings in the organic movement were: F. H. King, Farmers 
for Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, 1911; Rudolph Steiner, 
Agriculture: A Course of Eight Lectures, 1924; Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament, 1940; 
and Lady Eve Balfour, The Living Soil, 1943. 



 

117 

surrounding environmentalism drew the public’s attention to the dangers of pesticides 

and other agricultural chemicals. During the 1960s and 1970s, organic agriculture and 

its associated practices resonated with an increasing audience of gardeners, farmers, 

and consumers.  

As interest in organic farming grew, maintaining the integrity of the organic 

concept became paramount for movement farmers and consumers. Recognizing the 

changes that would accompany increasing consumer demand, Rodale’s son wrote in 

1971,  

For a long time, organic farming was a labor of love. Organic farmers rejoiced 
in the purity of an untarnished Nature, and farmed without chemicals for the 
sheer joy of saving the soil. Many of those organic farmers managed to make 
money too, but they were guided more by principle than by an urge to 
profit . . . some money-oriented farmers are prepared to accept a loose 
definition of what organic means. The problem is with marketers, not farmers 
because they are hungry to get a slice of the pie. (p. 73) 

In the face of increasing opportunism, Rodale began to develop a systematic 

verification system. In 1971, Rodale’s magazine, Organic Gardening and Farming, 

initiated a pilot organic certification program in California. The program consisted of 

obtaining a commitment from each farmer to build or maintain a three percent humus 

content in the soil within five years. An organic seal was developed to identify the 

commitment, commodity, and location of the farmer. Soil analyses, residue analyses, 

and personal inspections were also part of the program (Allen 1971:81). In 1972, the 

Organic Gardening and Farming (OGF) program included a questionnaire that asked 

farmers for information regarding the acreage committed to organic production, types 

of crops to be raised, normal problems facing the farmer (i.e., weeds, insects, fungus 

disease, and soil fertilizing), and organic methods and materials used. The OGF 

certification program grew to include regional groups in 20 states before it was 

terminated in 1973. After the termination of the program, farmers in various states 



 

118 

developed their own certification programs to continue to ensure the integrity of 

organically grown produce. Beginning with about 50 farmers, the California Certified 

Organic Farmers (CCOF) became the first organization following the termination of 

the OGF program to certify growers.  

After the creation of CCOF, certification organizations formed from local 

networks of organic farmers throughout the United States. The early certification 

organizations appeared in Oregon, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Michigan, and 

Minnesota. In addition to certification services, nonprofit certification organizations 

dedicated significant organizational resources to information sharing through monthly 

newsletters, conferences, and on-site workshops. In the absence of substantial support 

from university extension services and other traditional sources of agricultural 

information and assistance, these organizations became repositories of expertise, 

refining, accumulating, and disseminating knowledge of organic production practices. 

After a time, other types of certification organizations got involved in the industry. 

State departments of agriculture and for-profit firms entered the industry to provide 

third-party certification. While multiple verification processes existed, wholesalers 

increasingly demanded certified organic products. Phrases such as “we only accept 

CCOF certified products” or “we sell Oregon Tilth certified products” began to fill 

wholesaler directories. The growth and expansion of SBCOs had significant 

implications for producers entering the industry. In the following section, I describe 

the data and methods employed in my analysis of these implications and then explain 

my results.  

DATA AND METHODS 

The bulk of the data for this study comes from the National Organic Directory 

(NOD; 1986–2001), published by the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. This 

was the industry’s most comprehensive listing of producers, wholesalers, resource 



 

119 

groups, certification organizations, retailers, support businesses, and manufacturers in 

the United States. Listing in the directory was free for all organizations over the 

duration of the study period.  

I depart from the norm in organizational ecology that considers the beginning 

of a directory as a signal of the birth of a new organizational population. Directories 

generally appear fairly early in an industry’s development (Carroll and Hannan 

2000:168), yet firms in the “industry” are often already functioning with operations 

well underway before the publication of the first directory. For example, the first 

certification organization began in 1973, and a handful of farmers had been farming 

organically since the early 1940s. However, the National Organic Directory did not 

begin publication until 1986. Therefore, instead of conceptualizing a directory as 

evidence of the “birth” of an organizational population, one can see a directory as an 

effort to knit together a national market from otherwise disparate buyers and suppliers: 

“When one finds a continuous series of directories of a given kind of organization, a 

publisher believes many others will want to find the firms to sell to or to buy 

from . . . the purpose of the directory is to create markets; otherwise it is of only 

scientific interest, and will not make any money for the publisher” (Stinchcombe 

2002:419, emphasis added).  

An email from a key informant at the Community Alliance for Family Farmers 

(CAFF, the organization that produced the directory) alludes to the idea that the 

National Organic Directory served to create a broader market for organic products:  

It is inspiring to think that this organization, in its various incarnations, really 
did affect the organic foods industry, starting at a time when there *was* no 
industry—just isolated growers . . . It’s amazing to realize it now, but when 
CAFF started the National Organic Directory, it was almost impossible to find 
organic produce unless you knew someone who grew it. The whole thing was 
word of mouth. Gleaners (“food conspiracies”) from city co-op living groups 
would go out into the countryside, from farm to farm, looking for well-grown 
food. All summer long, dilapidated trucks full of hippies lurched down our 



 

120 

driveway in plumes of dust, hoping to fill up with organic fruit. (Personal 
correspondence, November 16, 2005) 

Consequently, I conceptualize entries and exits into and out of the directory as entries 

and exits from the marketplace rather than births and deaths of organizations.  

Dependent Variables 

There are two dependent variables in this paper: market entry and market exit. 

In this study, I focus on the population of organic producers. The unit of analysis for 

the market entry is U.S. state. The unit of analysis for market exit is the individual 

producer. I measure market entry as the count of all new farms that are listed in the 

NOD at time t, which is updated annually over the course of the observation period. 

To measure market exit, I constructed annual spells for each farm, beginning with the 

first time the farm is listed in the directory until the time that it disappears from the 

directory.  

Independent Variables 

Standards-Based Certification Organizations. To test the effect of SBCOs on 

market entry (hypothesis 1), I include a measure of the total number of certification 

organizations present in each U.S. state for each year of the observation period. To 

verify information on certification organizations listed in the NOD, I also consulted 

three additional directories,7 thereby capturing all certification organizations operating 

in the United States during the observation period of this study.  

Certification. To test hypothesis 2, I include a dummy variable for each year a 

firm is third-party certified.  

SBCO prominence. To test hypothesis 3, regarding the prominence of the third-

party certifier, I generate a prominence score for each firm on a yearly basis that 

                                                 
7 One published by the Organic Farming Research Foundation, another by the Agricultural Marketing 
Service of the USDA, and the third by ATTRA (Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas). 



 

121 

reflects the proportion of all farms certified by the certification organization j that 

certifies the farm i at time t.  

Certification x early entrants. To test hypothesis 4, I interact a dummy variable 

for all firms founded prior to 19908 with the dummy variable for third-party 

certification.  

Certification x density2. To test the moderating effect of third-party 

certification on competition (hypothesis 5), I include an interaction term with third-

party certification interacting with producer density.2 Unless otherwise noted, all data 

for these measures are derived from information found in the NOD. 

Control Variables 

I control for a number of important variables. First, I include a number of 

industry-related controls: the amount of land in farms, number of farms, change in the 

number of farms, change in the amount of land in farms, and the average size of farms 

in a state. These data come from the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the 

United States Department of Agriculture and are measured at the state level. Second, I 

control for the number of legal provisions passed in a state related to organic food. 

These data come from Westlaw and state administrative and regulatory codes. Third, I 

include a number of demand controls. I attempt to capture demand from buyers by 

controlling for the number of wholesalers in a state. I also include a measure of 

broader consumer demand. Because there is no data on the actual consumer demand 

for organic products during the period of study, I include a proxy for consumer 

demand. Because members of environmental groups tend to be more concerned about 

the impact of pesticides and fertilizers on the environment, I posit that Sierra Club 

members are more likely to be consumers of organic food than the average consumer. 

                                                 
8 Following a food scare in 1989 involving a carcinogenic chemical growth regulator on apples, demand 
outstripped supply, and the organic industry grew beyond local niche markets to a broader national 
marketplace (Lipson 2001). 



 

122 

Therefore, I include a yearly count of Sierra Club membership by state to capture 

consumer demand. To account for the possibility of reverse causation (increasing 

demand for certification leading to the creation of more SBCOs), I also control for 

demand for certification by including change in prior foundings of farms and change 

in prior percentage of producers certified. Fourth, I control for supply by including 

measures of the number of producers and number of producers squared in a state. 

Including the squared term of this variable is consistent with population ecology 

conventions to capture competitive effects associated with density (Hannan and 

Freeman 1989).  Finally, I control for firm-level characteristics including whether or 

not a firm is an early entrant (entered directory before 1990), age in the industry, and 

the degree to which a firm is vertically integrated. To calculate the degree of vertical 

integration variable, I summed the number of services that the firm provides as listed 

in the directory. For example, if a firm is listed as a producer, but also lists under 

“services” that the firm is a retailer, shipper, and processor, then the firm receives a 

score of 4. All covariates are lagged one year and updated annually. The unit of 

analysis in the entry models is U.S. state; in the exit analyses, it is the firm.  

ANALYSES 

To model market entry, I reverted to the negative binomial model because the 

data violated a key assumption of the Poisson regression (that the conditional mean of 

yearly foundings equals its variance). The negative binomial model remedies this 

problem by adding a parameter to account for the dispersion of the dependent variable. 

Given that the dependent variable is a measure of state counts over time, the 

observations are not independent. As such, it violates the assumption of independence 

among observations. Therefore, I use a negative binomial random effects model to 

account for the state-specific random effect. Doing so allows for interdependent 



 

123 

observations by modeling unobserved influences shared by all the counts of a state. 

The form of the model is:  

iijiij x θβθλ )exp()( =  

where λij is the predicted foundings in state i  in year j, θi is a gamma-

distributed random effect for region i, and xijβ represents the vector of independent 

variables and coefficients for state i in year j. I estimate random effects models in 

Stata 9 using the xtnbreg command. 

To model market exit, I use discrete-time event history methods because the 

exact timing of market exit is not known and there are many “tied” events in the data. 

Employing discrete time models can handle these problems without introducing bias 

into the parameter estimates (Kalbfleisch and Prentice 1980; Yamaguchi 1991). I use a 

complementary log-log model, which is appropriate for longitudinal binary dependent 

variables and is able to handle multiple events within the same time period. The model 

can be expressed as:  

itit XtP ')())1log(log( βα +=−−  

where the hazard of exit in each year is equivalent to Pit , the conditional probability 

that exit occurs to firm i in year t, given that it has not already occurred and X is a 

vector of covariates. I selected the complementary log-log discrete time model over 

the more common logistic regression model because the complementary log-log is a 

discrete time analogue model to a continuous time hazard model (Singer and Willett 

2003). Although my data on market exit is discrete because of data measurement 

issues (i.e., annual directory information), it is inherently a continuous process. I use 

the xtcloglog command in Stata 9 to model market exit.  



 

124 

RESULTS 

Tables 3.1 and 3.2 report the correlations for the market entry and market exit 

analyses, respectively. Table 3.3 presents the results from the negative binomial 

regression of market entry clustered on state. Model 1 is a baseline model with only 

controls. Model 2 includes the number of SBCOs in a state to test hypothesis 1. The 

variable is found to be positive and highly significant, suggesting that greater SBCO 

presence leads to increased entry into the market, supporting hypothesis 1. Controlling 

for demand for certification (captured by the inclusion of the change in prior 

foundings and change in prior percent certified), each additional certification 

organization in a state increases entry rates by 53 percent and is highly significant in 

predicting market entry. Thus, hypothesis 1 is supported.  

Table 3.4 presents the results from the maximum likelihood analysis of market 

exit. Model 1 presents the baseline model. Model 2 includes the firm-level third-party 

certification variable. The variable is negative and significant, supporting hypothesis 

2. Controlling for important firm-level variables such as early entry, age, and vertical 

integration, firms that are third-party certified are 57 percent less likely to exit from 

the market. Model 3 includes the measure of SBCO prominence. It is not significant, 

but the sign is in the expected direction. Model 4 includes an interaction term for 

certification and early entrance into the market. The sign is in the expected direction, 

but just misses the .1 significance level. Model 5 includes the interaction term for 

certification and producer density squared. This variable is negative and significant 

(supporting hypothesis 5), suggesting that firm-level certification moderates the 

curvilinear (competitive) effects of producer density. Model 6 is the full model. 

Certification shows a clear negative and significant effect in all previous models. The 

interaction term certification x density squared is also significant in models 5 and 6, 

suggesting that the finding is robust in the face of multicollinearity.  



 

 

125

 

 

 

TABLE 3.1: CORRELATIONS FOR MARKET ENTRY 
Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 
1. Farmland               
2. Number of farms .63              
3. Change in # farms .21 .07             
4. Change in farmland -.13 -.06 .20            
5. Farms/acres .25 -.24 .04 -.13           
6. Sierra Club  .10 .26 .10 -.05 -.25          
7. Wholesaler density .07 .15 .08 -.08 -.07 .50         
8. Change in prior foundings .04 .06 .00 -.04 -.02 .20 .27        
9. Change in prior % certified -.02 .00 .00 .03 -.03 -.02 -.04 .04       
10. Producer density .08 .15 .11 -.08 -.04 .43 .93 .14 -.05      
11. Producer density2 .05 .12 .07 -.07 -.04 .34 .82 .23 -.04 .90     
12. # legal provisions .23 .22 .24 -.02 .06 .21 .29 .07 -.01 .33 .24    
13. # legal provisions2 .31 .27 .25 -.02 .09 .22 .24 .03 -.01 .29 .21 .93   
14. % producers certified .00 .06 .10 -.04 -.09 .20 .09 .01 -.20 .13 .05 .27 .20  
15. Number SBCOs -.09 .16 .01 .03 -.25 .45 .35 .09 .02 .31 .25 .30 .20 .38 



 

 

126

 

 

 

 

TABLE 3.2: CORRELATIONS FOR MARKET EXIT 
Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
1.Farmland              
2.Change in # farms .29             
3.Change farmland -.12 .34            
4.Farms/acres -.30 -.02 -.06           
5.Sierra Club  .49 .13 -.26 -.31          
6.Producer density .41 .16 -.26 -.23 .73         
7.Producer density2 .36 .15 -.22 -.21 .63 .97        
8.% Certified producers -.01 .07 -.03 -.02 -.07 .05 .03       
9.Wholesaler density .41 .11 -.26 -.24 .76 .84 .79 -.11      
10.Legal provisions .50 .28 -.16 -.09 .58 .68 .61 .21 .52     
11.Early entrant .02 -.07 -.03 .00 .00 -.09 -.09 -.31 .00 -.18    
12.Age in industry .06 .12 -.03 -.04 .11 .23 .23 .23 .07 .26 .29   
13.Vertical integration .03 -.02 -.03 .00 .09 .05 .05 -.18 .11 -.01 .17 .02  
14.Certification .03 .04 -.02 -.08 .05 .07 .07 .30 .00 .12 -.19 .11 -.05



 

127 

 

TABLE 3.3: NEGATIVE BINOMIAL REGRESSION MODELS OF MARKET 
ENTRY, 1986–2000 
Variable/ Model #       1      2 
Farmland 8.90e-06 1.24e-05* 
 (7.13e-06) (6.49e-06) 
Number of farms 6.76e-07 -5.67e-07 
 (4.32e-06) (3.96e-06) 
Change in # farms -1.38e-04*** -9.72e-05** 
 (5.23e-05) (4.60e-05) 
Change in farmland 5.62e-05 2.75e-05 
 (1.65e-04) (1.43e-04) 
Farms/acres .175 .212 
 (.148) (.133) 
Sierra Club  .360*** .303*** 
 (.095) (.091) 
Wholesaler density -.002 -.000 
 (.006) (.004) 
Change in prior foundings .034*** .045*** 
 (.006) (.006) 
Change in prior % certified 1.788*** 1.757*** 
 (.312) (.310) 
Producer density .005 .007 
 (.007) (.006) 
Producer density2 3.03e-05 9.55e-06 
 (2.66e-05) (2.38e-05) 
Number of legal provisions .061*** .052*** 
 (.018) (.017) 
Number of legal provisions2 -.002*** -.001*** 
 (.000) (.000) 
% producers 3rd party certified .381 .278 
 (.265) (.258) 
Number of SBCOs  .423*** 
  (.083) 
Constant -3.537*** -3.408*** 
 (.875) (.813) 
Wald χ2 223.63*** 283.44*** 
Degrees of Freedom 14 15 
* significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%; n=700; 50 states 
 



 

 

128

TABLE 3.4: MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ANALYSIS:  ORGANIC FOOD MARKET EXIT, 1986–2000 
Variable/ Model # 1 2 3 4 5 6 
Control Variables       
Number of farms 3.71e-07 4.03e-07 5.45e-07 3.09e-07 4.09e-07 3.53e-07 
 (1.17e-06) (1.17e-06) (1.19e-06) (1.17e-06) (1.17e-06) (1.19e-06) 
Change in # of farms -1.22e-04*** -1.24e-04*** -1.25e-04*** -1.22e-04*** -1.24e-04*** -1.21e-04*** 
 (3.25e-05) (3.25e-05) (3.25e-05) (3.25e-05) (3.25e-05) (3.25e-05) 
Change in farmland 2.96e-05 2.86e-05 3.23e-05 3.16e-05 2.83e-05 3.34e-05 
 (1.32e-04) (1.33e-04) (1.33e-04) (1.34e-04) (1.32e-04) (1.33e-04) 
Farm/acres -.041 -.050 -.040 -.048 -.046 -.039 
 (.062) (.062) (.063) (.062) (.062) (.063) 
Sierra Club  .089** .095** .097** .096** .095** .097** 
 (.039) (.039) (.039) (.039) (.039) (.039) 
Producer density -.014*** -.015*** -.014*** -.014*** -.015*** -.014*** 
 (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) 
Producer density2  8.31e-05*** 8.94e-05*** 8.57e-05*** 8.69e-05*** 1.11e-04*** 1.09e-04*** 
 (2.85e-05) (2.86e-05) (2.91e-05) (2.87e-05) (3.04e-05) (3.13e-05) 
% certified producers -.057 .091 .093 .108 .034 .048 
 (.216) (.219) (.219) (.220) (.222) (.223) 
Wholesaler density -.002 -.002 -.002 -.002 -.002 -.002 
 (.002) (.002) (.002) (.002) (.002) (.002) 
Legal provisions -.005 -.004 -.005 -.004 -.004 -.005 
 (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) 
Early entrant -.448*** -.514*** -.511*** -.340* -.495*** -.261 
 (.122) (.124) (.124) (.178) (.124) (.183) 
Age in industry (ln) -.202*** -.188*** -.187*** -.180*** -.182*** -.172*** 
 (.056) (.056) (.056) (.056) (.056) (.056) 
* significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%; n=2854, 915 firms 



 

 

129

 

TABLE 3.4 (Continued) 
Variables/ Model # 1 2 3 4 5 6 
Control Variables       
Age in industry (ln) -.202*** -.188*** -.187*** -.180*** -.182*** -.172*** 
 (.056) (.056) (.056) (.056) (.056) (.056) 
Vertical integration -.172*** -.170*** -.172*** -.170*** -.171*** -.172*** 
 (.034) (.034) (.034) (.034) (.034) (.034) 
Certification 
Variables       

Certification  -.322*** -.272** -.258** -.215* -.091 
  (.095) (.119) (.108) (.112) (.144) 
Cert x early entrant     -.299  -.389* 
    (.226)  (.231) 
SBCO Prominence    -.347   -.143 
   (.495)   (.506) 
Cert x density2      -2.61e-05* -2.99e-05** 
     (1.36e-05) (1.42e-05) 
       
Constant -.877** -.748** -.777** -.826** -.805** -.931** 
 (.369) (.370) (.373) (.376) (.372) (.382) 
Wald χ2 139.38*** 149.01*** 149.37*** 146.93*** 151.30*** 149.68*** 
Degrees of Freedom 13 14 15 15 15 17 



 

130 

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 

The intent of this paper was to explicate the role of standards-based 

certification organizations in the structuring of new markets and to quantitatively 

assess their effects on market entry and exit dynamics. Theoretically, I have argued 

that SBCOs create standards, advocate for their adoption, and then verify and certify 

claims made by adopting organizations. The formal market entry analysis supports the 

claim that in the organic food industry, SBCOs served as both mitigators of 

uncertainty and sources of legitimacy by actively creating and evangelizing standards 

at a broader market level and, at the same time, verifying organic claims and providing 

endorsements to compliant firms. Controlling for alternative explanations, the analysis 

suggests that for each additional SBCO in a state, entry rates into the organic market 

increase by 53 percent.  

The exit analysis suggests that firm-level certification decreases the likelihood 

of exit from a market for which a firm has “authorization” to participate in. Such 

certification can decrease the probability of exit by 57 percent. Further, there is 

evidence that certification moderates the effects of competition, providing a buffer for 

organizations against the competitive effects resulting from increasing density within a 

market. The moderating effect of certification on early entry is not strongly supported.  

Based on these results, this study makes multiple contributions. First, it 

extends research on institutional entrepreneurship by moving beyond process 

explanations of institutional change to focus on how the actions of SBCOs influence 

market dynamics of exit and entry. SBCOs and their standards are inherently 

normative by nature (Scott 1995) and the normative dimensions of institutions are 

understudied (Casile and Davis-Blake 2002). By focusing on the normative efforts of 

SBCOs to impose order on a marketplace, this study provides evidence that entry and 



 

131 

exit decisions on the part of firms are subject to broader normative institutional 

influences.  

Another related contribution supports the growing research agenda focused on 

structural aspects of new industry creation, which has begun to examine how new 

market niches and industries become taken for granted. By focusing on the role of 

standardization and certification processes, I advance this agenda and answer calls 

from institutionalists concerned with the role of standards and norms in fostering 

entrepreneurial activity (Hwang and Powell 2005) and entrepreneurship scholars that 

recognize the need for increased attention to the structural and institutional aspects of 

the environment that are beyond the control of entrepreneurs but that nonetheless 

shape the existence of entrepreneurial opportunities and the efficacy of entrepreneurial 

efforts (Eckhardt and Shane 2003).  

Finally, by focusing on an industry in which standards “create” the underlying 

product value, this research expands our conception of the role of standards in market 

creation and growth beyond the important concepts of network externalities and 

interoperability that are well established in the technology literature. Many new 

market niches (particularly those concerned with the environmental and social 

externalities associated with more “traditional” means of production) depend heavily 

on the integrity of standards, verification methods, and endorsement processes for 

value and continued market growth. Thus, it behooves scholars to understand the way 

in which these nascent markets are employing standardization and certification 

processes.  

This preliminary study signals many opportunities for future research. First, 

this analysis is limited to organic producers only. Future research on the role of 

standards in nascent markets would benefit from examining how standardization 

influences all firms along the value chain. For example, because organic wholesalers 



 

132 

act as the key interface between producers and retail markets, they are in a position of 

dominance (Hawley 1950). Given their position of both power and uncertainty, 

wholesalers may have been the greatest advocates for third-party certification. 

Examining how third-party certification impinges on and changes value-chain 

dynamics among different organizations would be a promising future direction. 

A second avenue for research would be to examine the implications of the 

organizational vehicle of the standards. For example, Garud et al. (2002) highlight the 

inherent tensions that arose as Sun Microsystems attempted to both create and enforce 

Java as a standard. Future work should examine whether more objective nonprofit and 

government certification organizations face different challenges than for-profit 

certification organizations. Future work could match particular characteristics of firms 

with particular types of SBCOs. For example, small farmers often preferred to certify 

with locally based certification organizations, whereas larger farms and processors 

tended to seek out for-profit, internationally focused certification organizations. An 

analysis of these relationships may yield interesting SBCO-specific dynamics as the 

marketplace for both organic food and certification developed.  

Finally, in this study, I have assumed that the effects of the actions taken by 

SBCOs and their endorsement are constant over time. I have also assumed (aside from 

the early entry/certification interaction variable) that the relative salience or value of 

the certification to broader constituencies is constant as well. Future work should 

determine the degree to which the broader institutional environment endorses or even 

requires third-party certification as a prerequisite for participation in a particular 

market. This study provides a solid foundation from which to develop this broader set 

of theoretical questions. Grappling with these ideas will advance understanding of 

how standards-based certification organizations influence new market creation in a 

more nuanced fashion.  



 

133 

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