Edible Insects: Legitimating Nascent Industries with Norm-Challenging Core Product
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nascent industries often struggle to survive and grow. The difficulties are often amplified when core products challenge prevailing norms. We study how such industries build legitimacy through a longitudinal case study of Europe’s insect-for-food and -feed industry from 2003 to 2023. We find that at its emergence, this industry diverged into two subsegments—one focusing on insects as food for humans (more norm-challenging) and the other as feed for livestock (less norm-challenging). Each subsegment developed and built legitimacy mainly separately, but eventually converged into a unified industry driven to reduce persisting uncertainties affecting all firms. This divergence-then-convergence path challenges previous research that suggests nascent fields first form collective legitimacy before differentiation occurs. We propose that the cognitive mechanism of diverging product affordances—actors’ different perceptions of the industry core product’s potential—underpins this process. Our findings contribute to the literature on legitimacy and industry emergence by showing that divergent industry segments can eventually cohere to achieve whole-industry legitimacy while preserving each segment’s diverging approaches toward the norm-challenging nature of the core product.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it