Up in smoke? The lingering influence of history on community identity dynamics

Abstract

While prior research suggests that 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 article, we develop a comparative case study of 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.