Playing games of governance: How and why Fair Trade pioneers evade corporate capture

The concept of power in political governance has traditionally focused on domination and the preservation of the status quo. In an economic context, institutional and organizational studies have expressed growing interest in the dynamics of agency and institutional change, captured in the concept of “institutional entrepreneurship.” In the context of global free trade, the Fair Trade movement's experience shows that ongoing institutional entrepreneurship is important for entrepreneurs to transcend absorption by corporate hegemony. In this article I examine the capacity for agency in market institutions through the lens of “defiance” to illuminate the imaginative “game players” who evade institutional capture in the evolution of market governance.