Facilitating Marketization <i>à contrecœur</i>: Why Stakeholders May Continue to Support Organizations that Introduce Market Practices Violating their Values

Abstract Research on institutional logics provides ample evidence that market logic and its associated practices have spread across fields within capitalist societies – a phenomenon commonly called ‘marketization’. However, logics research has paid little attention to the individual‐level mental processes that facilitate marketization. Of particular interest are the processes that can lead a stakeholder who embraces a non‐market logic to continue to support an organization that introduces a new market practice (hereafter a ‘marketizer’), even though the stakeholder perceives this practice to violate values encoded in the non‐market logic she adheres to. Drawing on the legitimacy‐as‐perception perspective and insights from social psychology, we argue that four socio‐cognitive mechanisms increase the likelihood that the stakeholder will continue to support a marketizer: compensation, buffering, dependence, and adjustment. After illustrating our theory with the example of soccer fandom, we discuss its broader implications for the phenomenon of marketization. We argue that it would be misguided to assume that marketization can only proceed to the extent that it is deemed desirable by the majority of affected stakeholders. Based on this insight, we launch a reflection on actions that stakeholders can take to curb the spread of market practices that violate values that most of them hold.