We analyze how institutional persistence unfolds. Building on an historical analysis of 3,307 bottle labels in the Bordeaux wine community, France, between 1924 and 2005, we find that the persistence of a chateau tradition requires considerable effort at maintenance. Instead of greater compression and taken-for-grantedness, we propose that expansion along multimodal carriers provides a marker of a deepening institutionalization. We underscore the role of community organizations in enabling a wine tradition to persist. The implications of our findings for institutional theory and multimodality research are discussed.

Reference:

Grégoire Croidieu, Birthe Soppe, and Walter W. Powell. 2017. Cru, Glue, and Status: How Wine Labels Helped Ennoble Bordeaux, in Markus Höllerer, Thibault Daudigeos, and Dennis Jancsary (Eds), Research in the Sociology of Organizations (Volume 54B: Multimodality, Meaning, and Institutions: 37-69), Emerald: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/S0733-558X2017000054B002