This project will address how industries involving agricultural products evolve within the context of differing levels of regulation. There are many studies of existing industries, but few regarding how industries for new products evolve. In addition, these new industries are often subject to varying regulations across the contexts in which they are located, including conflict between federal and state regulations governing production, marketing and sales. This conflict creates uncertainty for entrepreneurs and for the general public. This project will analyze how different political, cultural, and economic processes are shaping the ways that new industries are structured, and analyze the effects of these forces and uncertainties on entrepreneurs. More specifically, this study will address two questions. First, when new industries evolve, who develops the capacity to change institutions? Second, how does the resulting structure from these institutional changes affect the experiences, frameworks, and practices of entrepreneurs more broadly? The project moves beyond questions about which social contexts are more and less likely to be associated with changes in institutions such as laws and customs of business because it also explores who is developing the capacity to influence these processes in real time. This research will provide insights into evolving industries that may be useful to state and national policymakers tasked with developing regulations to control industry operations. It will also provide insights to support entrepreneurship, thus contributing to higher levels of business creation and employment. This project will use a mixed-methods research design that includes analysis of three different states, each of which takes a different approach to regulating new agricultural products. The project will include 70 semi-structured in-depth interviews with participants across the states, which will be analyzed using MAXQDA 2018 Analytics Pro software in order to identify patterns in the data that will be used in developing theoretical propositions. These propositions will be tested with a subsequent cross-sectional survey of selected entrepreneurs across many states with a target response rate of 408 participants. These two approaches are combined to determine which institutions will persist over time and which ones will fail to persist. Findings from this project will inform organizational theories of institutions focusing on the supply-side, sociology of culture theories of practice, and theories of social control in an effort to develop an integrated framework to explain how micro-level industry activities can produce macro-level social change. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.