Corporate Collectivism in the Alcohol Industry and the Emergence of Issue-Based Industry Collectiv

We build on an exploratory study of the global emergence of industry collectives around the issue of alcohol-related harm to understand how central actors may attempt to maintain their positions in the face of legitimacy threats. In particular, we focus on the evolution of the issue-based field of alcohol-related harm in the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK in order to (a) describe the unique features of issue-based industry collectives (IBICs) and (b) examine the factors that contributed to their emergence and proliferation. We find that one important characteristic of IBICs is that they span categories. We theorize that such collective category spanning is more likely to occur when (i) there is a stable power balance between categories, (ii) there are pre-existing ties across categories, and (iii) there is a credible regulatory threat. These findings contribute to our understanding of institutional maintenance and corporate collectivism. Our study also enhances the literature on corporate collectivism by investigating a new domain and by providing evidence for what factors shape the emergence of issue- based industry collectives.