Fighting “factory fiction”: How marginal actors resist the dominant in UK book publishing

Abstract

This study gives insights into how marginal actors are able to resist a logic that has started to characterise a field. Based on the case of how small independent book publishers in the UK fight the increasing commercialisation of trade publishing that has led to the emergence of “factory fiction”, we identify three groups of resistant actors: preservers, who maintain an alternative minority logic, innovators, who purify a minority logic, and reformers, who radicalise a minority logic. We find that non-powerful, marginal actors can radically detach themselves from a dominant logic through causing internal logic shifts in a way that allows them to build a distinct niche for themselves. Our mu..