EXPRESS: Up in Smoke? The Lingering Influence of History on Community Identity Dynamics

Abstract

While prior research suggests that novel ventures not yet present in a given geographic community might threaten reflective aspects of community identity (i.e., materiality and rhetoric), it has yet to explain the divergent outcomes they might engender. In this paper, we develop a comparative case study of comparable communities where recreational cannabis dispensaries were founded and underlaid a noticeably different effect on identity reflections. Our findings suggest that different threat interpretations – founded in communal characterizations of history – spur theoretically similar yet descriptively different processes through which these elements co-evolve. Furthermore, these processes involve a wide range of actors and occur irrespective of the venture’s ultimate influence on reflections of community identity.