Product Delegitimization and Practice Re-emergence: A Historical Case Study of Infant Formula Market and Pro-Breastfeeding Movement in the U.S., 1971-2000

Research has illuminated how as new technological product markets emerge and grow, they alter or replace older production and consumption practices. Once such markets achieve legitimacy and maturity, relationships between market actors become institutionalized and taken for granted. Transformation in or decline of such mature markets often entails disruption, usually from newer markets. Therefore, we know less about how mature product markets undergo delegitimization when challenged not by new commercial alternatives, but by social movements promoting market-eschewing production or consumption practices. Understanding this process is increasingly critical as today, various social movements motivated by wide-ranging social and environmental justice issues challenge established product markets through promoting practices rooted in craft, natural, communal, or care values that forswear the capitalist market system. To examine this, I am building a historical case study of the mature product market infant formula and pro-breastfeeding social movement in the U.S., focusing on the period of 1971 to 2000, drawing on extensive archival materials from formula firms, breastfeeding and anti-corporation activists, pediatricians, regulatory agencies, parents, and mainstream media. My emerging findings show a cyclical process recurring throughout time: entry of fringe actors whose goals resonate with some incumbents, reconfiguration of entrenched relationships between key market constituents, and actors’ adaptation to shifting normative expectations of their behaviors. These produce oscillating dynamics between dominance of formula product and breastfeeding practice that, in the long run, culminate in product market contraction and diffusion of practice-in-decline.