The Green Rush: Field Transformation, Institutional Change, and Social Control in the United States Cannabis Industry

Abstract

One of the most vexing problems in sociology has been developing an adequate explanation for how micro-level action influences macro-structural change in society. Intersecting lines of research on markets have developed partial explanations to this issue that represent variations on a similar theme–fissures in stable institutional orders allow actors to recognize opportunities to shape the trajectory of their market environment. Recent work has proposed that these fissures amount to institutional voids that enable actors to creatively mobilize resources to address challenges that stem this instability. The patterned ways that actors address these challenges amount to provisional institutions that create a temporary order until they are replaced with more enduring, permanent structures. Yet, little work has attempted to understand the contexts that facilitate the emergence of provisional institutions, and more importantly, how provisional institutions influence the future institutional orders that replace them. This dissertation speaks to this gap in the literature through a case study of commercial cannabis in the United States. Broadly, I argue that the contexts that precipitate the emergence of institutional voids inform the ways in which actors recognize and respond to them, which comes to characterize the types of provisional institutions that emerge in these vacuums. More specifically, I argue that the cannabis industry is in some degree in control over the future laws that emerge at various levels of government due to the extended conflict between state and federal laws. Across three papers, I provide an explanation for how this occurs using originally collected data that include interviews with cannabis entrepreneurs in California, Arizona, and Texas (N=56), and a cross-sectional survey of cannabis entrepreneurs across the United States (N=192). In the first article, I show how regulatory ambiguities are rife in cannabis programs because they are emerging at the state-level and examine how cannabis entrepreneurs react to them. I find cannabis entrepreneurs react strategically, leveraging these ambiguities as opportunities to implement practices that simultaneously further their own business goals and build legitimacy with government stakeholders. In the second article, I propose a theory for how these practices turn into provisional institutions. I show how regulators adopted specific logics for crafting cannabis regulations in California, Arizona, and Texas. However, I find that cannabis entrepreneurs also leaned into these logics when implementing strategies to respond to absent regulatory guidance that influenced policy reforms. While the nuances of how this occurred (which I call sumptuary administration) looked different in each state, it was a patterned occurrence lending evidence that this operated as a type of mechanism to scale the influence of the cannabis industry to the regulatory process. In the third and final article, I examine what types of strategies cannabis entrepreneurs adopted to address common challenges across the market. I find three specific provisional institutions that the cannabis industry relies upon to broaden social acceptance of their enterprise while also fortifying their control over the trajectory of the market. Collectively, this dissertation represents a point of departure theoretically and empirically for the study of institutional change. Theoretically, I find that carefully examining fractured regulatory environments provides a key to understanding how micro-level action scales to the macro-level and contextualizes the cascading effects of these actions on intersecting, adjacent, or otherwise overlapping institutional orders. Empirically, I provide an explanation for how commercial cannabis has acquired the requisite forms of capital to stymie a multitude of political-cultural efforts that have been undertaken to prevent the market from existing.