Seminario Contested category emergence in moral markets: frame plurality around plant protein in Finland

The seminar is reserved for the Department of Management’s community. Other interested colleagues can contact Leonardo Corbo (leonardo.corbo@unibo.it).

Moral markets are contested spaces in which opponents and proponents of value-laden categories coexist. In such environments, it is the interplay among these groups, rather than the judgment of any single dominant actor, that ultimately shapes the success and growth of emerging categories. This paper investigates how such interactions unfold, and what consequences they have for the moral market. Using the rise of plant-based food in Finland and a multi-method approach—drawing on two decades of longitudinal online discourse (2005–2025), interviews with producers, and archival material—this paper identifies four competing frames held by pragmatist and ideologist market actors that collectively shape category emergence.

Short biography

Kata Isenring is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Strategy and Entrepreneurship research unit at the Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics. She earned her PhD in Management from the University of St. Gallen. Thanks to her academic background in political science and international relations, her research adopts a systems perspective on institutions, viewed as entities embedded in broader social and market structures. Her work has evolved from studying macro-level phenomena, such as market evolution and industrial development, to exploring meso- and micro-level dynamics, including inter- and intra-group heterogeneity in social evaluations. Her current research focuses on three interconnected themes: the public as a driver of market dynamics, organizational adaptability in evolving markets, and the intersection of organizational theory and major societal challenges. After her doctorate, Kata worked as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, was awarded the JYU 2025 Visiting Fellowship, and spent three months at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, continuing to contribute to the University of St. Gallen's long-running study of the Swiss private banking sector.