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A meditative and spiritual practice with the ultimate aims of self-diminution, ego transcendence, and union with the divine ( Strauss, 2004) was transformed into a “certifiable,” priceable, and user-friendly product with different proprietary versions promising a positive body image, fitness, and stress relief that could be bought and sold in the market. Eventually, the movement was cleansed of its anti-materialist essence and “market-encumbering” religious constraints.
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This is remarkable because, inspired by Hindu philosophy ( De Michelis, 2004), the yoga movement’s central codes were meant to provide an antidote to the individualism and consumerism fostered by capitalism, aiming to free one from all worldly, material considerations ( Vivekananda, 1947). This ascetic, anti-market movement that started in India and arrived in earnest on American shores in 1893 came to be at the center of an $80 billion global market in 2016, one-fifth of which was in the United States. Yoga is a particularly fertile empirical setting for investigating these dynamics. How is conflict with markets resolved in such movements? Countercultural movements ( Roszak, 1995 Andretta, della Porta, and Saunders, 2019) oppose not just specific aspects of markets but the ideological underpinnings of market capitalism ( Cini et al., 2017), which poses a more fundamental obstacle to accommodating the market mechanism as a means of scaling up. These movements include, among others, streams of the environmental movement ( Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer, 2000), anti-capitalist movements ( Reinecke and Ansari, 2020), and religious and spiritual movements ( Rojas and King, 2018 Yue, Wang, and Yang, 2018) that oppose the commodifying nature of a market and seek a radical transformation of society. Movements that explicitly oppose the idea of creating profit-driven markets around what they consider to be civic, social, and community-based responsibilities ( Radin, 1996) cannot readily embrace markets as a means to scale up, even though markets provide a potent means to increase impact. However, as these movements seek change explicitly through the market and do not fundamentally oppose a market system or an exchange infrastructure, they can still accommodate the mainstream market for scaling up, even if they try to avert the blunting of their radical edges. Recent research has identified various strategies for avoiding this fate and achieving the twin goals of scaling up and preserving the movement’s authentic values ( Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2020). As movements attempt to scale up by expanding their boundaries and harnessing the power of markets, they risk diluting their core values and ethos ( Hiatt, Sine, and Tolbert, 2009 Lee, Hiatt, and Lounsbury, 2017).
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Movements try to infuse markets with morals, often by supplying cultural codes that contain a “values” dimension of the morally desirable and undesirable ( Weber, Heinze, and DeSoucey, 2008) however, markets also permeate movements and influence them in important ways ( Soule and King, 2015). Studies at the intersection of social movements and markets (e.g., Carroll and Swaminathan, 2000 King and Pearce, 2010) have shown how the relationship between the two can be contentious and confrontational, as well as collaborative and complementary. Through this extreme case of the yoga movement, we advance understandings of how movements can become syncretic with values and practices they fundamentally oppose. We show how codes borrowed from parallel movements and templates borrowed from markets can be instrumental in driving such a movement’s transformation. This process involves not only external entrepreneurs looking to mine the movement but also movement leaders seeking wider enrollment of resource-rich actors to scale the movement up. We show how, before such a movement can be commodified, it must be de-essentialized, a process that requires stripping away key aspects of its history, context, and religious commitments and transforming collective goals into individual ones. Our analysis of yoga between 19 reveals how a countercultural movement fundamentally opposed to a capitalist market economy but seeking to grow can paradoxically become syncretic with or infiltrated by concepts and beliefs that are core to the market system but incompatible with the movement’s original ethos.
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But this process can be particularly challenging for movements that are explicitly opposed to using a market mechanism as a means of scaling up. Movements seeking to infuse markets with moral values often end up utilizing the market mechanism and support from mainstream actors to scale up, even if it comes at the cost of diluting their founding ethos.