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Engineering Legitimacy
 Iva Petkova

Engineering
Legitimacy
How Institutional Entrepreneurs in E-Commerce
Bring Fashion Companies into the Digital Age
Iva Petkova
Ringling College of Art and Design
Sarasota, FL, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-90706-2 ISBN 978-3-319-90707-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90707-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941870

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In memory of my Grandmother, Rumi
 Preface

This book arose as a subject of my long-term ethnography, hailing from

Columbia University’s Sociology Department all the way to London,
Milan, Paris, and back. I discovered the topic while walking the National
Retail Federation’s Big Show at the Javits Center in New York in 2010.
My main scholarly interest was rather clear: a fascination with empirical
worlds at the threshold of technology, creative cultural industries, and
entrepreneurship. My goal while there was to search for innovations and
unique developments in technology and culture, particularly in fields
surrounding the fashion industry. In my ethnography notes post-NRF,
I had feverishly scribbled: “the most difficult times often spot innova-
tion. Retailers and technology companies are embracing the need for
new technology, new paradigms, new culture…” e-commerce was the
big tech hike. But, while companies of every industry embraced the
migration of their businesses and brands online, the numerous fashion
company representatives I sought out, were not particularly in on this
memo. Meetings featuring fashion professionals discussed familiar topics:
trend research, product design, development, and their further automa-
tion. The big reveal came in a flash (as these always tend to), during a
meeting of trend experts in fashion, who seemed to offer to my attention
more insight about fashion industry’s ritualism and conformity than they
(or Merton himself) would have known: “Classic definition of fashion is
a reflection of the society we live in”, one of these long-time industry
experts intoned, “and society is so fractured that people in forecasting,
manufacturing, merchandising, or selling haven’t yet understood that the

vii
viii    Preface

old yardstick of mainstream mentality no longer works. You could predi-

cate your plans based upon your simple equation, but we have a hundred
different rivulets of fashion, moving in different directions. Is trending,
for instance, still trendy?”
These sage voices of (mild) dissent led me to pursue two interrelated
avenues for my research: were there any fashion companies that passion-
ately pursued new technology developments, specifically with regard
to repositioning their brands, businesses, organizations, and cultures
online? Correspondingly, were there any high-tech Internet entrepre-
neurs, which sought to persuade this shift in “consciousness” in incum-
bent fashion firms? And if they did, and could, how were they achieving
this unfathomable feat? These musings later transformed into serious
scholarly pursuit addressing some long-standing question marks in the
sociology of organizations. How do emerging institutional entrepre-
neurs, often outsiders to institutionalized organizations in creative cul-
ture industries, legitimize their practice with incumbents in such creative
fields? And, how can rhetorically driven incumbents in the fashion indus-
try risk aligning their identity with the technology-driven identity of
e-commerce and social commerce entrepreneurs?
The reader probably suspects that John Meyer and Brian Rowan had
allured me as a scholar with their initial hypotheses on myth and cer-
emony in institutionalized organizations. Mark Suchman, later, enticed
me to answer these questions by looking at legitimation processes. And,
Woody Powell recently cemented the deal for me, by having “sent” a
scholarly invitation to use neo-institutional theory along with detailed
ethnographic data to reveal how institutional practices come to be legit-
imated. I did answer these questions, eventually. And, the answer is in
this book. I did find e-commerce entrepreneur companies that passion-
ately led fashion companies to the digital age; and, I traveled extensively
and interviewed widely fashion companies, whose executives expressed
their own passionate beliefs as to whether the paradigm of brick-and-
mortar was changing, or forever remaining an archetype one couldn’t
circumvent.
I am grateful to my ethnography ‘hosts’ at Digital Moda—one of the
largest e-commerce fashion companies worldwide—who selflessly permit-
ted me to carry on my observations and interviews both in New York
and Milan. Their willingness to answer any questions I came up with, as
well as their knowledge, passion, and humility about the fashion indus-
try, will forever mean a lot to this author.
 Preface    ix

I am also thankful to my colleagues at the remarkable Center for

Organizational Innovation (COI) at Columbia University, and espe-
cially to my advisor, David Stark. Special thanks also goes to people
who provided meaningful advice along the way: Eva Boxenbaum, Micki
Eisenman, Priscilla Ferguson, Candace Jones, Gayle Kaufman, Bruce
Kogut, Massimo Maoret, and Pilar Opazo-Breton.
Finally, I would be amiss not to mention my gratitude to Keith,
who kept the household together while I was frequently away with my
thoughts, in another dimension, writing; to John, who spent tireless
hours on the phone; and, to “Brian”—one of the greatest, most humble
e-commerce innovators there is.
Enjoy the ride!

Sarasota, USA Iva Petkova

 Contents

1 Introduction: Field Transformations and Institutional

Entrepreneurship in Cultural Industries 1
Bibliography 13

2 New Institutional Entrepreneurs in the Fashion Industry 17

Demography and Culture in an Emerging Institutional Field 17
Early Experiments in the Emerging Field of Digital Fashion 19
Bluefly.com 20
eLuxury.com 24
The Transformation of Narratives for Legitimization
into Moral Legitimacy 26
Formalizing Commercial Practice into Pragmatic Legitimacy 37
Extending Pragmatic Legitimacy into Influence Legitimacy,
and the ‘Culture Premium’ 39
Bibliography 47

3 Fashion Companies: Organizational Responses

to Managing Innovation in E-Commerce Practice 49
Shifting Paradigms in the Fashion Industry 53
Adaptation Responses to E-Commerce: From ‘Re-artification’
to ‘Resistance to Artification’ 62
Re-artification: Maintaining the Gap Between Structure
and Practice 67

xi
xii    Contents

Resistance Against Artification: Closing the Gap Between

Structure and Practice 75
Bibliography 83

4 The Evolution of Digital Moda as an Institutional

Entrepreneur 85
Institutional Emergence: Story-Telling Through Narratives
for Legitimization 89
Acquisition Strategy: Balancing Between Commercial
Appeal and Aesthetic Exclusivity 96
Acquisition and Pricing of Product in the United States:
The ‘Eyeballing’ Rule 98
Bibliography 101

5 Digital Moda: Institutionalizing Legitimacy

in the Fashion Industry 103
Seeking Moral Legitimacy in the Fashion Field 107
Gauging the Moral “Fit” for Collaboration 112
Achieving Pragmatic Legitimacy: The Partner Division 114
Extending Pragmatic Legitimacy: Pure Brand Unit 123
Institutionalizing Influence Legitimacy: Digiluxe.com 129
Bibliography 135

6 The Fruits of “Creative Disruption”: Influence

Legitimacy and Tech Culture Transfer to Fashion
Industry Gatekeepers 137
Dissimilar Cultures, Divergent Results: Brick-and-Mortar
Media Publishers and Pragmatic Legitimacy 141
Similar Cultures, Divergent Results: Google Ventures
and Moral Legitimacy 146
“The 2.0 Stuff ”: Co-branding and the Culture Premium 151
Transferring Tech Culture to Brick-and-Mortar Media
Publishers 155
Pure Brand Unit and Vogue Italy 162
Pure Brand Unit and Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) 164
Pure Brand Unit and a Global Fashion Media Publisher 168
Bibliography 172
 Contents    xiii

7 Ethnography at the Threshold: A Confessional on Theory

and Method 175
Bibliography 185

Index 187
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Polyvore.com—building “sets” 36

Fig. 2.2 Extending pragmatic legitimacy with fashion companies 40
Fig. 2.3 Co-branding—Moda Operandi and Marchesa 40
Fig. 2.4 Editorial collaboration—“in association with Chloé” 41
Fig. 3.1 Organizational structure at MilanModa3 65
Fig. 3.2 Keeping Artification Afloat: Formal Organizational
Structure at Maison Française 66
Fig. 3.3 Moving between commerce and art: resistance against
artification in digital practice 82
Fig. 4.1 Evolution in competence in Digital Moda 88
Fig. 5.1 New practices as innovation vehicles for fashion companies 107
Fig. 5.2 Inverted “openness to creativity” pyramid 110
Fig. 5.3 Partner division at Digital Moda 116
Fig. 5.4 Pure Brand Unit 125
Fig. 5.5 Collaboration ‘tiers’ between Digiluxe.com and fashion
company partners 132

xv
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 E-commerce and social commerce companies—Evolution

in practice 18
Table 3.1 Re-artification and de-artification as institutional practices 52
Table 3.2 The appeal of ceremonial/artified practice, 2010–2012 63
Table 6.1 Ensuring alignment in collaborating with
social commerce partners 140

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Field Transformations

and Institutional Entrepreneurship
in Cultural Industries

We started out as an incubator of ideas for the transitioning of the cul-

ture of fashion companies online. We provide them with a set of tools that
allow them to be independent. But, they are not experts in E-Commerce
and we devise together a strategy for the online world.
—CEO, Digital Moda, NYC, 2012

On a crisp winter morning in January of 2012, a lively discussion took

place at the New York regional headquarters of Digital Moda—an
e-commerce fashion company.1 In the conference room before me
the North American CEO, the Head of Merchandising, the Director
of Marketing and the Chief Branding Officer discussed how to best
approach collaboration with one of the world’s largest publishers of
monthly fashion media. The talk revolved around a partnership pro-
posed by the conglomerate and its likely effect on the partners of Digital
Moda—established luxury fashion companies. Skeptically evaluating the
online selection of fashion content on one of the largest fashion mag-
azines owned by the publisher, the Head of Merchandising at Digital
Moda frowned, “curating content to the max, such as presenting mer-
chandise from brands that happen to be this or that blogger’s favorite,
is unlikely to drive recognition or revenue for us, unless the shopping
site that is supposed to sell this curated content also happens to be the
site of a well-known brand”. The North American CEO sighed, and
noted that “the media industry has started to realize that it is productive
to link product and content. But, what we want is in any collaboration

© The Author(s) 2018 1

I. Petkova, Engineering Legitimacy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90707-9_1
2 I. PETKOVA

for customers to be led to [our] content. All this interaction needs to

occur online.” The Director of Marketing had assessed how the pub-
lishing conglomerate approached collaboration with other e-commerce
fashion companies and was not impressed. “In their initial proposal,
thoughts and progression-wise, they were far beyond others,” he noted.
“Structurally, however, they still act as paper media publishers. As much
as this old player wants to view [Digital Moda] as a partner, they are also
trying to indeed impress us with their digital knowledge”. The Chief
Branding Officer—a longtime fashion industry editor—settled the dis-
cussion. She noted that the online selection of fashion brands featured
on the largest in the conglomerate’s portfolio of fashion magazines was
“… so overcurated. We don’t want to niche-fy all of our brands into one
property. This is my biggest concern”. The CEO completed the collec-
tive thought process of the small group: “Publishing firms think: how
much can we charge for content, instead of what content should we
feature? They will never change, however they progress, unless [Digital
Moda] tells them how it works”.
The above discussion at Digital Moda is a fascinating snippet of data
illustrating the struggles for legitimacy by online fashion organizations
(e-commerce and social commerce) in the institutional field of fashion
over the past decade. e-commerce fashion companies, like Digital Moda,
ShopBop.com, and Asos.com, are retail technology organizations that
own and develop electronic commerce and marketing technologies to
support their operations. E-commerce fashion companies acquire, pro-
mote, and sell branded fashion apparel through an electronic medium
and without maintaining retail stores to display their merchandise.
Social commerce companies, such as Polyvore.com and ShopStyle.
com, are the main partners of e-commerce fashion entrepreneurs. These
companies engage in a form of e-commerce that links consumers with
curated fashion product, displayed in dedicated online galleries where
consumers compete with each other to create looks, and “click-to-buy”
fashion product (Khosrow-Pour 2018). E-commerce and social com-
merce fashion companies are involved in collaboration that combines
two ubiquitous institutional advantages in the fashion industry—the
aesthetic and the commercial—enjoyed previously only by brick-and-
mortar s in the industry, such as Neiman Marcus, and fashion maga-
zines, like Vogue.
Since 2006, Digital Moda has operated the e-commerce design, oper-
ations, and aspects of digital communications and marketing, for over
 1 INTRODUCTION: FIELD TRANSFORMATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL … 3

two-dozen global luxury fashion companies, turning into more than

three-dozen brands and growing in 2017. Started by people with no
insider knowledge of the fashion industry and driven by the entrepre-
neurial action of “simply the doing of new things, or the doing of things
that are already being done in a new way (innovation)” (Schumpeter
1947, p. 151, emphasis added). Digital Moda and other e-commerce
fashion companies have become accepted as institutional partners by lux-
ury fashion companies, exposing, in the process, traditional fashion com-
panies and their fashion product to a wider global audience, lower price
points, and new economic and aesthetic practices. The founders of these
new companies frequently referred to their businesses as a new genera-
tion fashion companies. Their executives typically arrived from financial
and investment banking backgrounds and frequently reported to have
been culturally influenced by early digital pioneers, like Amazon and
eBay. During their fledgling developmental phase, in the beginning of
the aughts, these Internet entrepreneurs used e-commerce technology
to start their technology-driven fashion businesses, grappling with com-
peting ideas of validating themselves as brand destinations and market-
ing channels without any direct access to fashion organizations, fashion
media publications, or fashion retailers. For the first time in the history
of fashion as a creative culture industry, e-commerce and social com-
merce entrepreneurs—companies with limited formal practice in any
of the areas of deep institutional expertise of fashion companies—mer-
chandising, communications, or retailing—and no prior existing ties in
the industry, have gained responsibility for operating the e-commerce of
established luxury fashion companies, including marketing, and advertis-
ing of their branded apparel product.
The case of these new entrepreneurial organizations is a distinctive
study that addresses one of the least understood aspects of institutional
legitimation in creative culture industries: the mechanisms by which new
organizations achieve legitimacy and garner influence in deeply institu-
tionalized culture industry contexts, where incumbent organizations
maintain significant gaps between their strategy formulation (i.e., “think-
ing”) and their behavior (i.e., “doing”) and exhibit low aspirations for
learning (Meyer and Rowan 1977; March 1991). What are the means
by which new creator organizations achieve legitimacy and influence over
such culture industry behemoths, as fashion companies? Finally, how
have long-standing creatures of ritual in culture contexts, like fashion
companies, resolved artistic versus commercial conflict that represents for
4 I. PETKOVA

these mature organizations a chief hurdle to accepting new paradigms in

their organizational practice?
In laying out the latter inquiry, I should briefly acknowledge that the
conclusions of earlier comparative studies in innovation by Christensen
(1997), Tushman and O’Reilly (1996) and Christensen and Raynor
(2003) still stand. Incumbents across established industries can suffer
from dissociative behavior and can exhibit slowness to change in the con-
text of maladaptive practice. Existing players in an industry indelibly fail
to appreciate how novelty will affect them, due to the different institu-
tional and business logics operating in these organizations. Newcomer
entrepreneurs are, therefore, enabled at least in part, to take advantage of
the disruption by creating a viable niche, where they could test new prac-
tice that eventually becomes requisite for existing players in a given field.
However, creative culture industries present a more complicated reality
of adaptation to change than manufacturing contexts do.
This is because fields of cultural production are first, located at an
intermediary position “between the artistic field and the economic
field” (Bourdieu and Delsaut 1975, p. 22). Second, the classic bound-
ary maintenance between art and commerce across culture industries is
but a metaphoric representation of organizational reality in these con-
texts, as the formal structure of organizations in these domains tends
to be loosely related to their actual work repertoires, yet closely related
to artistic rhetoric and ritual (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Powell 2012).
Finally, against this institutional backdrop, cultural fields are increasingly
exposed to interrelated processes of erosion of their external bound-
aries and to ongoing “transformation of [their] internal hierarchies”
(Pedroni and Volonte 2014, p. 102; Crane 2012; Entwistle and Slater
2014). The current evidence for a dynamic transformation occurring in
cultural industries can be, in part, attributed to the erosion of the insti-
tutional advantage of ‘art’ in these contexts (de-artification); a situation
that in some settings field-level constituents attempt to accordingly for-
tify (re-artification) (Shapiro and Heinich 2012). Artification occurs
when cultural industries face changes in opportunity spaces, institution-
alization, and legitimating ideology that render the existing bounda-
ries between commercial and aesthetic intent untenable. The ambiguity
resulting from these ongoing processes of transformation is potentially
detrimental to incumbents because constituent organizational actors in
these creative culture contexts—executives at various organizational lev-
els, for one—are averse to challenging the upheld validity of aesthetic
 1 INTRODUCTION: FIELD TRANSFORMATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL … 5

over commercial intent, and their practice has characteristically sup-

ported a striving to become an art form.
Unquestionably, some of these transformational processes have
opened up creative contexts to new distribution and marketing chan-
nels, such as the digital channel, and through the subsequent emergence
of new organizational forms along their boundaries, shifts in power
have occurred within their formal structures. In the music industry, for
example, organizational transformations are frequently heralded as a
radical new development, in which virtual communities of artists and
consumers engage in the building of “dynamic and self-organizing enti-
ties based on patterns of electronic information interchange” (Hughes
and Lang 2003, p. 180). In this respect, particularly in the Scandinavian
music industry, the digitization of music contours the emergence of a
new “art-entrepreneurship” hypothesis, where relatively new practices,
such as self-publishing of music content have become a “trans-discipli-
nary, multifaceted” (Aggestam 2007, p. 31) paradigm in the making
that unites both commercial and aesthetic logic. In other cultural con-
texts, such as photography, the trend has been to reframe the praxis in
this industry from a “middle-brow art” (Bourdieu and Whiteside 1996),
concerned more with striving towards the aesthetic and less with devel-
oping social practice, to a paradigmatic new method of collective par-
ticipation and creative expression used in our habitus (Koskinen 2017).
Finally, with the emergence of new digital streaming media and vid-
eo-on-demand online players, like Netflix, there has been a transfor-
mational shift in culture contexts producing cultural products that
conventionally “could not be defined as ‘art’”, such as TV drama (Lavie
2015, p. 20). Amazon, Facebook, Google, Match.com, Microsoft,
Netflix, Twitter, and other technology-driven companies have altogether
transformed the meaning of aesthetics and culture, from one connected
to the opinion of professional taste-makers, such as TV and film critics,
to one in which culture is “algorithmic”; it is understood as an “emer-
gent framework of identification” in which consumers co-participate
in the production of aesthetics and taste with the help of algorithms
(Hallinan and Striphas 2016, p. 118).
The field of fashion is not impervious to these larger developments.
Fashion companies have long maintained organizational siloes that
appreciate an institutional separation between art and commerce. On
the one hand, fashion companies and their apparel product have been
deemed to represent an aesthetic economy (Entwistle and Rocamora
6 I. PETKOVA

2006; Crane 2012) with no commercial considerations (a practice that

Bourdieu and Delsaut in 1975 (p. 28) called “transubstantiation”).
Increasingly, however, the fashion industry is depicted as a highly glo-
balized field of commerce that bridges “multiple networks that connect
an upstream of suppliers to a downstream of customers through a mar-
ket interface made of producers” (Aspers and Godart 2013, p. 181).
This shift in scholarly interest has importantly revealed that personnel
working outside the area of design in fashion firms, such as visual mer-
chandisers, have a growing strategic, technical, and procedural influ-
ence, even though they engage in producing “forms of creativity that
are different from designers and communicators” (Mora 2006, p. 349,
emphasis added). Milanese designers themselves have embarked on a
path of emphasizing a de-artified “culture of wearability” in their prac-
tice, materialized through the service relation of apparel, rather than in
the production of apparel as art (Pedroni and Volonte 2014, p. 110).
Communications divisions in fashion firms are, correspondingly, adapt-
ing to new modes of cultural production of content, such as blogging,
in which they frequently discover the opposing and autonomous mes-
sages of fashion bloggers (Pedroni 2015; Rocamora 2013). Finally, as
the structure of the high-fashion field changes and its commercial aspects
become more apparent, fashion journalists have (as in prior times during
the history of the field) become fixated on reconstructing designer fash-
ion as an artistic (re-artified) practice (Van de Peer 2014).
Accepting the legitimacy of technology-driven e-commerce fash-
ion organizations and their practice is a significant challenge not only
for established fashion companies, but also for essential field constit-
uents, which direct the path of the field—retail consultancies, fashion
media, brick-and-mortar retailers, and flagship industry associations
(e.g., British Fashion Council in the UK, Fondazione Altagamma in Italy,
CFDA—Council of Fashion Designers of America in the United States).
The technical knowledge and skills developed by e-commerce and social
commerce entrepreneurs could not and did not automatically result in
the production of legitimacy vis-à-vis fashion companies. The lack of
prior cultural support by fashion companies had, in fact, exposed earlier
entrants in e-commerce fashion in the 1990s to Stinchcombe’s “liability
of newness” (1965, p. 148) hypothesis and doomed them to a higher
risk of failure (see, e.g., DiMaggio 1988; Zuckerman 1999). In the first
ten years of the new century, only a few luxury fashion firms had e-com-
merce businesses, organizational units that regulated e-commerce, or
 1 INTRODUCTION: FIELD TRANSFORMATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL … 7

advertised their brands online. One well-known marketing consultant at

a global retail consultancy called this behavior “a response out of appre-
hension and fear”. Another industry pundit interpreted it as a cultural
“tantrum” indicating lack of preparedness, awareness, and risk-taking
in fashion firms. In short, the well-oiled “cognitive, moral and regula-
tive” (Lounsbury 2008, p. 349) institutional logics operating in fashion
companies have converged to problematize the relationship of fashion
companies with outsiders (e.g., e-commerce companies), delay the for-
mulation of new commercial goals by fashion executives, and deepen
aversion to technology (Crane 1997, 2012; Parkins 2013).
The practices traditionally awarded legitimacy in fashion are linked
to creative design, communications, and organizational support of the
highly regularized relationship between fashion companies, brick-and-
mortar retailers and fashion magazines (Bourdieu 1993a; Godart 2012).
My empirical investigation into the work of professionals with strate-
gic and positional influence in areas other than design across five lux-
ury fashion companies in this book demonstrates the existence of two
distinct trajectories of adaptation. The first trajectory reveals that fash-
ion company executives can continually choose to convey their support
for existing siloes and downplay the introduction of new work prac-
tices, even when their executive teams have objectively decided to create
e-commerce units within the formal structure. This form of adaptation
occurred when established organizational units in some fashion compa-
nies, such as Communications or Retail, subsumed e-commerce under
their provenance to safeguard the boundary between formal structure
and actual work repertoires. Once the unfamiliar practice of e-commerce
was placed in an established, well-known organizational silo, it was re-ar-
tified. An already existing, institutionally legitimated, ceremonial practice
was picked to take over e-commerce without concern for the develop-
ment of actual work repertoires, associated with the new practice. In the
second instance, when new executives were hired to define and represent
e-commerce in the formal organizational structure, they quickly moved
to solidify the new practice and align e-commerce rhetoric with the con-
tent of actual work by engaging in a symbolic rebellion for independ-
ence—a “resistance against artification” (Shapiro and Heinich 2012)—to
support the work of the new unit.
This mentality of active opposition to new organizational practices
in fashion companies is hardly beneficial for outsider legitimation and
is a product of their low aspirations for learning, yet high sensitivity of
8 I. PETKOVA

complying with the constraints of the institutional environment. Deep

investigative accounts have been scarce on detailing the mechanisms
used by new organizational dwellers in established institutional fields in
culture industries to gain legitimacy. Scholars have, in particular, tended
to squarely place online businesses as dichotomous conduits of informa-
tion to larger publics or other businesses. Earlier studies on technology
innovation have suggested that online businesses are successful due to
their ability to develop a “continually morphing” menu of capabilities
(Rindova and Kotha 2001; Hagel 2002). Taxonomy of online organi-
zational forms has also been suggested, based on the capability of online
organizations to transmit ever more complex information to consumers
or other related firms (Sawhney et al. 2003). In this taxonomy, online
companies were relegated to mediating information (thus, the name
“infomediaries”) or mediating innovation (thus, the title “innomediar-
ies”). Yet, e-commerce and social commerce companies, like Digital
Moda, have transmitted more than “information” to established fashion
companies over time. In fact, these organizations have influenced the
development of innovative practices with significant legitimacy to fashion
incumbents and the emergence of new behavior in fashion companies,
such as the opening up of e-commerce units as part of latter’ organiza-
tional structures.
In short, cultural intermediaries in the classic Bourdeausian sense,
these companies were not. E-commerce and social commerce organiza-
tions did not engage in constructing a digital space “authentic” to the
existing elites in the fashion field and aspirational to the masses, that the
elites were going to abandon once the “masses” had reached it, thus giv-
ing rise to cycles of new fashions, and indeed a whole new industry of
cultural intermediaries in charge of keeping the high-intensity pace. To
the contrary, by developing a collectively legitimated template of com-
mon cultural values in which their legitimizing rhetoric was aligned with
the egalitarian ideology of their own base of operations—the Internet—
new organizations in digital fashion developed a fundamental ‘logic of
confidence’ vis-à-vis the brick-and-mortar fashion field ‘proper’ (Meyer
and Rowan 1977; see, also, Suddaby and Greenwood 2005). Their exec-
utives dictated rules in that space, crosscutting the technical environment
of these entrepreneurial technology players and looking to legitimize
their innovative practice in the institutionally elaborated field of fashion.
E-commerce and social commerce organizations frequently edu-
cated each other on the value of their new practices. Before the role of
 1 INTRODUCTION: FIELD TRANSFORMATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL … 9

adopters was conferred to fashion companies, it was initially played by

other peers in the community, who shared templates of behavior and
rhetoric, and partook in ceremonies of mutual affirmation (typically, fast-
paced start-up celebration events in New York City), while educating
and facilitating the access of other members to new technology (Shah
and Tripsas 2007; Garud and Karnøe 2003). Within their own commu-
nity, e-commerce and social commerce companies were incentivized to
collaborate, in order to better control the ambiguity of their own tech-
nical environment. In the absence of digital fashion institutions that
governed their behavior, and of professional level audiences that sanc-
tioned their work, orientation with regard to each other’s work priorities,
and the advantage of receiving feedback through their own community
did the job (White 2002; Tripsas 2009). This situation created advan-
tages for both types of organization, insofar as it allowed each to estab-
lish dominant position in interpreting the uses of e-commerce and social
commerce technology to insiders in their self-defined group in digital
fashion.
My remedy to this fundamental puzzle of outsider legitimation in
cultural fields was ultimately resolved by Woody Powell’s recent invita-
tion to use neo-institutional theory along with “detailed ethnographic
studies that reveal how institutional practices come to be legitimated”
(2012, p. 201). In the case of the fashion industry, an ethnographic
study had to scrutinize multiple layers of legitimacy that e-commerce
entrepreneurs might encounter. In 1995, Mark Suchman developed
two perspectives—strategic and institutional—in gauging the pros-
pects for gains in legitimacy by new organizations. These perspectives
required that two types of legitimacy—moral and pragmatic—were
sought by new organizations. The institutional perspective maintained
that new entrepreneurs need to gain cultural support for their actions
based on the moral approval of established players; in this case, fashion
companies and field-level professional fashion organizations (cf. Meyer
and Scott 1983). The strategic view offered that new organizations
should strive to gain pragmatic legitimacy by involving themselves into
a direct economic exchange with established constituencies. Suchman
(1995, p. 574) had also provided one of the finest (and broadest) defi-
nitions of legitimacy around—as “a generalized perception or assump-
tion that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper or appropriate
within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and
definitions”.
10 I. PETKOVA

In the case of e-commerce and social commerce entrepreneurs, I con-

sidered that both moral and pragmatic legitimacy should be investigated.
The reason was that although the technical environment of e-commerce
and social commerce companies required them to “‘get the job done’”
(Suchman 1995, p. 603), in this case, by developing efficient practices
in e-commerce—and, obviously, attempting to be commercially success-
ful—the institutional environment of fashion companies would require
these new organizations to “‘make sense’” (ibid., p. 604; see also,
Deephouse and Suchman 2008) to established players. Moral legitimacy
was the harder thing to establish. Whereas pragmatic legitimacy was
established by the development of an “acceptable commercial practice”
(Scardaville 2009, p. 366), moral legitimacy was a wholly distinctive
object of analysis.
The following historical example illustrates the importance of
moral legitimacy, or lack thereof, for a pioneering e-commerce fashion
retailer—Bluefly, Inc.—founded in 1998. Despite creating an authorita-
tive voice in its first filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC) on the intent to develop “eight future principal elements of suc-
cess” (Bluefly Inc. 2001, p. 6) for the hopeful field of e-commerce fash-
ion, Bluefly was unable to gain cultural acceptance by fashion companies.
Even though company executives continued to highlight over the years
their projected goal of acquiring premium matrix of fashion brands for
Bluefly’s e-commerce website, as early as 2002 the management team
conceded to purchasing fashion apparel both directly from fashion brand
owners and indirectly from third-party distributors. Furthermore, the
company apparently intended to expand relationships with “suppliers
of end-of-season and excess name brand apparel and fashion accesso-
ries” (Bluefly Inc. 2002, p. 25). Industry pundits and fashion company
executives reinforced these historical arguments. A merchandising exec-
utive in one luxury fashion company expressed disapproval impatiently
in an interview in 2011: “No, no. It’s an online outlet: opposite men-
tality! Price and order delivery is important, but it’s opposite mental-
ity!” The Director of a flagship European fashion association noted that
“Bluefly was an experiment; online outlet. Buying leftovers; very well
done, but very simple”. In April 2012, after fourteen years in the busi-
ness of e-commerce, Bluefly reported accumulated financial deficit of
over $162,485,000 (Bluefly Inc. 2012). As Bluefly’s example suggests,
accomplishing both categories of legitimacy can be a protracted social
process that is easily compared to the four-stage process of diffusion of
 1 INTRODUCTION: FIELD TRANSFORMATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL … 11

innovations consisting of innovation, local validation, diffusion, and gen-

eral validation (Johnson et al. 2006).
The power of the institutional view is evident here in explaining how
to study moral legitimacy. New organizations will seek “cultural sup-
port”—and therefore, moral legitimacy—of a very specific nature. Their
own rationale for existence will have to align with “established cultural
accounts […] for its existence, functioning, and jurisdiction” (Meyer and
Scott 1983, p. 201) at the level of incumbent organizations in the fash-
ion field. The fact that these accounts have to be established (as well as
“credible [and] collective” (Suchman 1995, p. 575, emphasis added) put
e-commerce and social commerce organizations at a greater risk. Their
materialization as outsiders in the fashion industry at the dawn of the
2000s compounded the unlikelihood that these entrepreneurial ventures
will have accumulated credible collection of accounts from field organi-
zations in the fashion industry, or that they would have been perceived
as legitimate in the field. The hypothesis that there needed to be general
validation, in particular, also suggested that once e-commerce companies
had acquired credibility in the eyes of fashion constituents, they thence-
forth had to actively mobilize these moral commitments and transform
them into accepted commercial practice. The goal was, apparently, to
continue being evaluated positively by fashion companies and their con-
stituents (Suchman 1995).
I discovered that e-commerce and social commerce companies engage
in a three-stage mechanism for gaining legitimacy, which ensures that
their moral desirability is combined with pragmatic influence. When
faced with challenges resulting from a lack of moral legitimacy, e-com-
merce and social commerce companies initiated the development of nar-
ratives for legitimization in the field. Curiously, these narratives markedly
diverged from those of established field-level organizations and persisted
without active support from fashion elites in the field. Within their own
community, e-commerce entrepreneurs employed narratives for legitimi-
zation as rhetorical devices that are “oriented to collectively defined, and
often collectively mandated, ends” (Meyer and Rowan 1977, p. 349).
Narratives for legitimization really characterized the “digital” entry point
for e-commerce fashion entrepreneurs in the field. Their role was two-
fold. By creating narratives for legitimization their existence, e-commerce
entrepreneurs engineered an acceptable account of shared “cultural log-
ics” (Rao and Giorgi 2006) that were critical to the successful function-
ing of the new e-commerce field. The work on validating these accounts
12 I. PETKOVA

was among the most important facets of performance for new entrepre-
neurs, because, ultimately, shared logics had to be successfully communi-
cated to fashion companies at the threshold of “making sense” (Suchman
1995, p. 575) for incumbents.
The second component of gaining legitimacy included actions on the
part of e-commerce and social commerce companies to further formal-
ize their accounts of legitimacy—now established— into an acceptable
commercial practice. Using Suchman’s (1995) distinction, e-commerce
fashion entrepreneurs, essentially, transitioned from the moral legitimacy
of “making sense” to the pragmatic legitimacy of “having value” in the
fashion field. This was not the end of the road, however, since pragmatic
legitimacy needs to be sustained by extending it to a more specific form
of legitimacy, to which I refer as influence legitimacy. The production of
this latter form of legitimacy revealed an interesting tactic on the part
of e-commerce fashion entrepreneurs that was eerily similar to lobbying
tactics social movements had used in facilitating their own organizational
expansion (cf. Bromley et al. 1999). For companies in digital fashion the
expansion of influence was achieved by developing explicit tactics that
handed over some aspect of the partnership to fashion companies. One
such exceptional tactic was the ‘culture premium’, about to be explained
in the following chapters, that allowed e-commerce and social commerce
companies to influence the future direction in which established fash-
ion companies would approach new areas of practice that their execu-
tives had never encountered before, in online marketing, social media, or
advertising.
Ultimately, this book is about an unpredictable adventure with a sur-
prising result. It is about new organizational players, driven by technol-
ogy and curiosity, lacking credibility, yet acting brashly in a changing,
highly institutionalized cultural industry context. This story is also about
mature incumbents representing some of the most visible international
luxury fashion brands, that handled novelty ripe with apprehension and
fear, swerving between de- and re-artification of their product from and
into the category of art, as their executives kept changing positions, nav-
igating the complex path to adaptation to innovation and change. The
adventure about to follow, takes us through Milan, Paris, London, and
New York on an entrancing high-tech journey of understanding fashion
as a changing terrain of aesthetic and commercial culture in the twen-
ty-first century.
 1 INTRODUCTION: FIELD TRANSFORMATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL … 13

Note
1. The name is a pseudonym.

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Another random document with
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the days of the making of the brick for which no straw had been
given, and from the building of Pithom and Ramses, had been very
chequered years. In that time the fugitive people had had to pass
through many a fiery furnace of affliction. Their old task-masters had
again, as others, too, had done, set their heel upon them.
During that long lapse of time what a stumbling-block to the
Hebrew mind must have been the good things of Egypt: its wealth,
its splendour, its power, its wisdom; even its abundance of corn and
its fine linen: all that this world could give given to the worshippers of
cats and crocodiles. Egypt must have occupied in the Hebrew mind
much the same place that is held in the minds of many of ourselves
by the existence of evil. It was a great fact, and a great mystery.
Something which could neither be denied, nor explained, which it is
unpleasant to be reminded of, and which had better be kept
altogether out of the thoughts of the simple. The Hebrew “was
grieved at seeing the Egyptian in such prosperity. He was in no peril
of death. He was strong and lusty. He came not into misfortune,
neither was he plagued like other men. This was why he was so
holden with pride, and overwhelmed with cruelty. His eyes swelled
with fatness, and he did even as he lusted. He spake wicked
blasphemy against the Most High. He stretched forth his mouth unto
the heavens, and his tongue went through the world. The people fell
before him, and he sucked out from them no small advantage.” Such
was the aspect in which the prosperity of Egypt presented itself to
the mind of the Hebrew. “He sought to understand it, but it was too
hard for him.” How grand, then, how noble, and for us how
absolutely beyond all price, is the reiterated assertion of the Hebrew
prophets, even in the worst and darkest times of this long and trying
period, of the ultimate triumph of right; of a new heavens and a new
earth, that is, of a time when mundane societies would be animated
by diviner principles; and, pre-eminently, by those of universal
inclusion and concord.
At last came a large instalment of what many preachers of
righteousness had anticipated, and had desired to see, but had not
seen. That they had anticipated it under such adverse
circumstances, and had lived and died in the faith of it, is one of the
chief contributories to the historical argument for natural morality.
What they had anticipated came about, however, in a manner and
from a quarter of which they could have had no foresight. Beyond
the Great Sea in the distant West, a city, whose name Isaiah could
never have heard, and which was not even a name in the days of
Rameses, and for many centuries after his time, had grown into an
empire, in which had come to be included the whole civilized world.
All nations had been cast into this crucible, and were being fused
into one people. Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, were each of them the
children of a more ancient, and, in some respects, of a higher and
better civilization; but they, like all the rest, had been absorbed into
the world-embracing dominion, and were powerless within it, except
so far as ideas give power. Every people was now being brought
face to face with all other people, and into union and communion
with them. The way in which the religions of the world were thus
made acquainted with each other acted as a confutation of each in
particular, or rather of its external distinctive mythology. We can form
no adequate conception of what the effect must have been. They
were all alike discredited. The exclusiveness of each was confuted
by the logic of facts. It was out of this conjuncture of circumstances
that arose the new idea and sentiment of the brotherhood of
mankind. What had hitherto everywhere obscured the view of it was
now falling into decay; and what must suggest it had been
established.
And no people had been so thoroughly disciplined for receiving
this idea as the Jews. They had been brought into closest contact
with Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, and other oriental people; and it
had been that kind of contact which obliges men to understand what
other people think. And after they had received this hard schooling
from their neighbours, they had been brought into the same kind of
contact with Greek thought. They had been obliged to take into their
consideration the knowledge, and the ways of thinking, of the
Greeks. They had even been to a great extent compelled to learn
their language. Some of the writers of the New Testament, it is clear,
had been taught Greek, just as we may be taught French; and
Homer, it is evident, had been the school-book employed in teaching
them the language. And now, together with all the rest of the world,
they had become members of the universal empire of Rome. All this
would have led to nothing except obliteration and absorption, as it
did elsewhere, if the Jews had been like other people. They were
incapable, however, of succumbing in this way, because they had
ideas and moral sentiments that were, in some important respects,
truer, and stronger, and better than those of their conquerors and
oppressors. Hence originated the idea of their conquerors that they
were the enemies of the human race. It was, then, for this reason,
because, being indestructible and unassimilable, they had been
obliged to consider the meaning and worth of other peoples’ ideas,
and of facts, that Jerusalem came to be the definite spot upon which
the fruitful contact of the different integers of the East with each
other, and of East with West, of Europe with Asia, actually took
place. Here were collected, as into a focus, the knowledge and the
circumstances which would engender the new sentiment that was to
reverse the old one. The old one had been that of narrow
exclusiveness. It could not have been otherwise. The only one that
could be engendered by the new knowledge, and the new
circumstances, was one of universal inclusiveness: not the idea of a
peculiar people, such as the Egyptians had regarded themselves,
but its very opposite, that of the universal brotherhood of mankind.
We see the embryo of the thought endeavouring to assume form at
Rome, at the very time that it was being preached with the sharpest
and clearest definition at Jerusalem. But it never could have
assumed its proper, clear, distinct form at Rome, because morality
would always there have been hazy and corrupt, and inextricably
entangled with ideas of self and dominion. In Jerusalem only, the
one true home of single-purposed morality, could it assume its true
shape, pure and undefiled. When the words were uttered, “Ye all are
brethren,” the idea was formulated. That was the moment of its birth.
It then took its place in the moral creation, a living form, with life, and
the power of giving life; with power to throw down and to build up.
This was the new commandment, the seminal idea of the new
religion, and Jerusalem was the seed-bed, prepared for it by the long
series of antecedent events, where it must germinate first. When that
had been done, scions from it might be taken to other localities. But
it is plain that, as moral instincts die hard, Jerusalem is also precisely
one of the spots in which the new sentiment will meet with the most
determined and violent antagonism; nor will it ever find there general
reception, or, indeed, so much reception as among other races,
where the instinct of repulsion had not been so completely and firmly
established.
The new sentiment had to be evoked from man’s inner
consciousness, as it was acted upon and affected by the new order
of things. This could not be done until the authority of this inner
consciousness had been recognized. This means a great deal. What
it had come to regard as true and good was to be religion, as
distinguished from written law, which is imposed by the State, has
convenience and expediency for its object, and is limited in its
purview by the necessities of its application, and by the ignorance
and low sentiment of public opinion. The Christ-enlightened, God-
taught, pure conscience is a better and higher and more searching
rule of life than any legislation. That would only drag conscience and
life down again to the common level. To make that religion would be
making Cæsar God: an evil necessity that had, to some extent,
inhered in the Old Dispensation. It would kill conscience, which aims
higher, goes deeper, and sees farther than written statutes and
enactments, however well meant, or wisely drawn. The new religion,
therefore, stood aloof from, and placed itself above, all existing
legislation, except in the sense of submitting to it, and obeying it as a
social and political necessity. But though it submitted itself to, and
obeyed, it could not receive, a written code as the rule of life. While,
therefore, it recognized the rights and necessities of the kingdoms of
this world, it found in man’s conscience the law of a kingdom not of
this world. The polity it created was not of them. It was God’s
kingdom among men. The kingdoms of the world might at some
future time become the kingdoms of God, but at present Cæsar and
God were distinct powers, and represented distinctly different
applications of the principles of right. Cæsar’s application was partial
only, and, moreover, full of corruption; God’s was all-embracing and
incorrupt.
The day of trial had been long in coming, but it had come at last;
and what we have been recalling to the reader’s mind was what the
wisdom of Egypt had to confront now. It was the apotheosis of the
ideas men could now attach to the words, Truth, Freedom, Justice,
Goodness, Knowledge, Humanity. These were of God, and made
man one with God. The time, then, had come for the Hebrew
bondman to be revenged: for the Hebrew invasion of Egypt. We may
contrast it with the old Egyptian invasions of Syria, and with the
Hyksos invasion of Egypt. It was of a kind of which the organized
wisdom of Egypt could have formed no anticipation; and against
which the temples and the priesthood of Egypt were as powerless as
heaps of stones, and dead men. It was an invasion of ideas which
could now be understood, and of sentiments which could now be felt;
and which were better than any the priests, and priest-kings of old
Egypt had in their day felt or understood; and the feeling and the
understanding of which would utterly abolish the system they had
maintained. These ideas and sentiments had been proclaimed in the
cities and villages of Judea and Galilee as the new commandment,
as the fulfilment of all religion. The whole Roman world was ripening
for their reception. They were carried down into Egypt in the
thoughts and hearts of those who had received them. They spread
from mind to mind, and from heart to heart. The fugitive bondman,
the cast-out leper had returned; but he had now come to bestow a
glorious liberty, to communicate the contagion of regenerating ideas
and sentiments, and of a larger and better humanity. The Hyksos
had again come down into the old Nile land; but this time they came
not to oppress, not to exact tribute, but to break bonds, and to
enrich, and to place men on a higher level than they had occupied
before. This was an invasion to which Egypt, in all its thousands of
years of national life, had never yet been exposed. Invasions of this
kind can be very rare in the history of nations, and in the history of
the human race; but if, when they do come, minds are prepared for
them, they are irresistible. And so it was now with old Egypt. The old
order of things passed away, and the new order of things came in its
place. The priesthood, with all their lore, their science, their wisdom,
their legitimacy of at least four thousand years, their impregnable
temple-fortresses, their territorial supremacy, the awful authority with
which a religion so old, that the memory of the world ran not to the
contrary, invested them, passed away like a morning mist. The whole
system fell, as the spreading symmetrical pine-tree falls, never to
burst forth again into new life—the overthrow having killed the root,
as well as all that had grown from the root. Even the very Houses of
the Gods which, as the thought of the days of Rameses had phrased
it, had been built for myriads of years, passed away with it, excepting
the few which have been preserved to tell the history of what once
had been.
All had been overthrown: but the Christian ideas and sentiments,
which had done the work, were too grand and simple for Egypt,
where the most inveterate of all instincts was for the mind to be
swathed. And so the new revelation was soon obscured. The
reaction came in the forms of asceticism and theology.
But asceticism and theology are not religion; or, at all events, not
such religion as can inspire much nobility of soul, or which has any
power and vitality, except under the circumstances which created it:
and so this, too, fell; and the religion which superseded it—that of
the Egypt of to-day—is, in its simplest expression, a reversion to the
old oriental idea, which seems always to have been a necessity
there, of authoritative, unchangeable legislation, combined, however,
with the Christian idea of the brotherhood of mankind. The form in
which the Christian idea has been incorporated into it is that of an
universal religion, which gives no sanction to exclusive pretensions,
either of nationality, or of caste.
It is natural for the traveller to wish that he could behold Egypt in
its old world order and glory; but he must console himself with the
reflection that what perished was what deserved to perish—what had
become narrow and false; and that what was good, true, and wise,
including the lessons Egypt’s history teaches, survived the crash. Of
all that we are the inheritors.

The fortunes and the future of the Christian idea and sentiment of
the brotherhood of mankind, which gave the new doctrine so much
of its power to overthrow the wisdom of old Egypt, interests and
concerns us all. From the days of its first triumphs down to our own
day it has been actively at work in Europe. Through all these
centuries it has been gaining strength. The first logical deduction
from it which, like its parent, becomes a sentiment as well as an
idea, is that of universal equality, for if all are brothers, then none is
greater or less than another. The flower with which this offshoot
blossoms is that of humanity. Under the old exclusive systems,
which placed impassable barriers between peoples, cities, and
tribes; and then between the classes of the same community; and
had therefore, said to human hearts, ‘So far may you go, and no
further; beyond this you need not—you ought not—to feel pity;
beyond this hatred and repulsion, the sword, the torch, the chain are
only to be thought of;’ the idea of humanity had been impossible: but
when all men are recognized as in essentials equally men, that
which makes them men assumes the definite form of this idea.
‘Honour all men’—that is, do all in your power to elevate every one
you may come in contact with, and nothing that has a tendency to
degrade any human being, whatever may be his complexion, blood,
caste, or position—was, we know, a very early injunction.
The greatest outward and visible achievement of the idea and
sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind was the abolition of slavery
and serfdom. This was effected very slowly. We are, however, rather
surprised that so Herculean a labour should ever have been
achieved by it at all. When we consider the inveteracy and the
universality of the institution; that it was the very foundation on which
society was, almost everywhere, built; that it was everywhere the
interest of the governing part of the community, that is, of those who
had power in their hands, to maintain it; that, in the early days of the
new idea, it never soared so high as the thought of so great an
achievement; and yet find, notwithstanding, that the old institution
has fallen everywhere; that no combination of circumstances has
anywhere been able to secure it; we begin to understand the
irresistible force of the idea. This was the greatest of all political and
social revolutions ever effected in this world.
The manifestations of the sentiment we are now thinking of have
been very various, in conformity with the circumstances of the times,
and the condition of those in whom it was at work. Some centuries
ago it came to the surface in Jacqueries and Anabaptist vagaries.
Now for some three generations it has been seen in volcanic
operation in French outbreaks and revolutions. It is the soul of
American democracy. It is at this moment working, like leaven in a
lump of dough, in the hearts and minds of all Christian communities.
There is no man in this country but feels its disintegrating, and
reconstructing force. Every village school that is opened, every
invention and discovery that is made, every book, every newspaper
that is printed, every sermon that is preached, aids in propagating it.
Its continued growth and spread gradually deprive governing classes
of heart, thus betraying them from within, and of a logically defensive
position in the forum of what has now come to be recognized as
public opinion. It is at this day the greatest power among men. The
future, whatever it is to be, must be largely shaped by it.
Here the study of the wisdom of old Egypt teaches us much. One
most useful lesson is that stability in human societies can be
attained; but that, as the constitution and sentiments of European
societies are now very different from the state of things to which the
wisdom of Egypt was applied, we must give to our efforts a form and
character that will be suitable to our altered circumstances. The
method they adopted was that of eliminating the elements of political
and social change, by arranging society in the iron frame of caste,
and by petrifying all knowledge in the form of immutable doctrine.
We cannot do this, and it would not be desirable for us to do it, if we
could. The obvious advantages of the Egyptian method were that,
under the then existing circumstances, it secured order and quiet;
and that it assigned to every man his work, and taught him how to do
it. Its disadvantages were that ultimately it repressed all higher moral
progress, denied all new truths, and consecrated what had become
falsehood and injustice. It was also worked, though with a great
immediate gain of power, from thorough organization, yet with a
great waste of the highest form of power, for it altogether overlooked
natural aptitudes, and, quite irrespectively of them, decided for every
man what he was to be, and what he was to do. We cannot suppose,
on the one hand, that there are no other methods of securing social
order and stability than these; nor, on the other hand, that American
democracy and Chinese mandarinism have exhausted all
alternatives now possible. This, however, is a problem we shall have
to consider for ourselves. Here it will be enough for us to see that,
even if it were within our power to attain to stability by the Egyptian
application of the Egyptian method, the result would still be subject
to the limitation of the rise of new ideas, and even of the
propagation, more widely throughout the community, of existing
ideas. These are absolutely irresistible. There is nothing under
heaven, especially in these days of rapid and universal interchange
and propagation of thought, which can arrest their progress. Their
elements pervade the moral atmosphere, which acts on our moral
being, just as the air, we cannot but breathe, does on our bodily
constitution.
We may also learn from this history that progress, about which
there has been so much debate—some glorying in it, some denying
it,—is an actual positive historic fact. What we have been reviewing
enables us, furthermore, to see precisely in what it consists. It does
not consist in the abundance of the things we possess, nor in
mastery over nature. We may continuously be overcoming more and
more of the hindrances nature has placed in our path; we may be
compelling her to do more and more of our bidding; we may be
extorting from her more and more of her varied and wondrous
treasures; but all this, in itself, possesses no intrinsic value. It is
valuable only as a means to something else. The old Egypt of the
Pharaohs might, conceivably, have possessed railways, power-
looms, electric telegraphs, and yet the old Egyptian might have
been, and might have continued to be for four thousand years
longer, very much what he was in the days of Sethos and Rameses.
The modern Egyptian possesses all these things, and the printing-
press besides, and yet is inferior, under the same sky, and on the
same ground, to his predecessors of those old times. The end and
purpose of material aids, and of material well-being, are to
strengthen, and to develop, that which is highest, and best, and
supreme in man—that which makes him man. Otherwise it is only
pampering, and rendering life easy to, so many more animals. The
difference would be little whether this were done for so many such
men, or for so many crocodiles and bulls. That which is supreme in
man—which makes a man a man—is his intellectual and moral
being. If this has been strengthened, enlarged, enriched, progress
has been made; he has been raised to a higher level; his horizon
has been extended; he has been endued with new power. History
and observation show that without some amount of material
advancement, intellectual and moral advancement is not possible,
and that all material gains may be turned to account in this way. This
is their proper place—that of means, and not of ends. They are ever
placing larger and larger proportions of mankind in the position in
which intellectual and moral advancement becomes possible to
them. That, then, to which they contribute, and which they make
possible, is their true use and purpose. Whoever makes them for
himself the end, dethrones that within himself, the supremacy of
which alone can make him a true man. Every one who has done
anything towards enriching, and purifying, and strengthening the
intellect, or the heart of man, or towards extending to an increased
proportion of the community the cultivation and development of
moral and intellectual power, has contributed towards human
progress.
The greatest advance that has been made in the historic period
was the implanting in the minds of men the idea, and in their hearts
the sentiment, of the brotherhood of mankind. The idea and
sentiment of responsibility dates back beyond the ken of history. Our
observation, however, of what is passing in rude and simple
communities, where social arrangements and forces are still in an
almost embryonic condition, leads us to suppose that it is an instinct
developed by the working, the necessities, and the life of society. To
our own times belongs the scientific presentment of the idea of the
cosmos, which, though a construction of the intellect, affects us also
morally. Who can believe that even the oldest of these ideas is
bearing all the fruit of which it is capable, and—that it will have no
account to give of even better fruit in the future than it has ever
produced in the past? How wide then is the field, in the most
advanced communities, for moral and intellectual, the only truly
human, progress! How impossible is it to foresee any termination of
this progress!
 CHAPTER XXXII.
EGYPTIAN LANDLORDISM.

Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new?

It hath been already of old time which was before us.—Eccles.

Landlordism, or the territorial system, which gives, generally

throughout a country, the ownership of the land to one class, and the
cultivation of it to another, who pay rent for it, is often spoken of as
something peculiarly English. We hear it said that this divorce of
ownership from cultivation is unnatural. That it is bad economically,
and worse politically. That attachment to the land, the great element
of stability in political institutions, hardly exists under it. On the other
side it is urged that it is a great advantage to a community to
possess in its bosom a large class, far removed from the necessity
of working for its support, which is, therefore, better able to set to
other classes an example of refinement, and of honourable bearing;
and of which many members will naturally desire to devote
themselves to the service of the state, and of their respective
neighbourhoods. We argue the point, as if the landlordism of
England were almost something sui generis. This is a mistake. The
same system was developed, only more designedly and
methodically, throughout Egypt more than three thousand years ago.
There the whole acreage of the country was divided into rectangular
estates. One third of these was assigned to the king, and the
remaining two thirds, in equal proportions, to the priestly, and to the
military castes. These estates were generally cultivated by another
order of men, who, for the use of the land, paid rent to the owners.
It is a curious fact, that the Egyptian farmer paid the same
proportionate rent which is paid by the British farmer of the present
day. Rent in Egypt three thousand years ago, was one fifth of the
gross produce. The circumstances of Egypt, of course, almost
exclude the idea of average land, for any one acre anywhere was
likely to be as good as any other acre anywhere else, all being
fluviatile alluvium similarly compounded. And all were subject to
much the same atmospheric conditions. There could therefore be the
same rent for the whole kingdom. But if the land did anywhere, from
some exceptional cause, produce more or less, this was met by the
system of paying a fifth. With respect to this country, however, we
must talk of averages. The average gross produce of average farms
is here, I suppose, estimated in money, about eight pounds an acre;
and the average rent of such a farm is about thirty-two shillings an
acre. Just one fifth. Exactly the proportion that was paid, as rent for
the land they occupied, by the tenants of Potiphar, Captain of the
Guard, and of Potipherah, Priest of On, Joseph’s father-in-law. The
same rent was paid by the occupiers of the farms on the royal
demesne to Pharaoh himself.
It may also be worth while noticing how similar circumstances
produced in those remote times, and produce in our own, similar
tastes and manners. Those old Egyptian landlords were not
altogether unlike their English representatives. There are traces in
them of a family likeness. They were much addicted to field-sports.
You see this everywhere in the sculptures and paintings. You find
there plenty of scenes of fowling, fishing, and hunting; of running
down the gazelle, and spearing the hippopotamus; of coursing and
netting hares; and of shooting wild cattle with arrows, and of catching
them with the lasso. They had their fish-ponds as well as their game-
preserves. They had, too, their game laws. They were fond of dogs
and of horses. They kept very good tables. They gave morning and
evening parties. They amused themselves with games of skill and
chance. They thought a great deal of their ancestors, as well they
might, for a thousand years went but for little in the date of the
patents of their nobility. They built fine houses, and furnished them
handsomely. They paid great attention to horticulture and
arboriculture.
If the estates in Egypt were all of the same size as the military
allotments mentioned by Herodotus, and the probability is that they
were, they must have been about ten acres each. This may be
reckoned as fully equal to thirty acres here; for in Egypt the land is all
of the best description, and is manured every year by the inundation;
and two crops at least can every year be secured from it, the
cultivation being almost like that of a garden under irrigation. This
would be ample for those who cultivated their land themselves.
Those who let it for a fifth would of course get that proportion of
every crop. The man therefore who had forty-two estates, as we find
it recorded of an old Egyptian on his tomb, had a very considerable
income. It would be interesting to know how he came to acquire so
many estates; whether by inheritance, by purchase, or by favour of
the Crown; whether there were any statutory limits to the acquisition
of landed property; and whether provisions were made for dispersing
a man’s accumulations at his death: for instance, supposing he had
received several estates from the Crown, was he merely a life-tenant
without power of absolute disposal, the estates reverting at his death
to the Crown? What was the rule of distribution generally followed in
their wills? How was the property of an Egyptian, who died intestate,
disposed of?
 CHAPTER XXXIII.
CASTE.

Ne sutor ultra crepidam.

In old Egypt, where we find the earliest development of Aryan

civilization, every occupation was hereditary. In the United States,
where we have its most recent development, no occupation is
hereditary. In Egypt a man’s ancestors from everlasting had
practised, and his descendants to everlasting would have to practise,
the same business as himself. In the United States it is a common
occurrence for the same man to have practised in succession
several businesses.
With respect to ourselves, it is a trite remark that in this country
legislation is the only work that is designedly made hereditary. It is,
however, obvious that this is an instance which is subject to
considerable limitations, both as to its hereditary character, and as to
its actual extent. For our legislator caste is always receiving into its
ranks recruits from outside, and its legislative power is only a power
that is exercised co-ordinately with that of an unhereditary chamber.
Circumstances, not positive institution, except indirectly, have
hitherto made our agricultural labourers very much of a caste. Those
who are engaged in this kind of work are generally descended from
those who have for many generations been so employed. Multitudes
of the class, however, escape from it; and every village school that is
at work amongst us is supplying means of escape from it for many of
those whose horizon it enlarges.
The clergy of the Established Church to a great extent form a
caste, but without hereditary succession. This caste character of the
clergy is a result of their segregation from secular employments, and
of their corporate perpetuity.
 Serfdom had, in mediæval Europe, a similar effect, which was, at
the same period, felt at the other extremity also of society, through
the institution of feudal nobility.
But the most widely-spread form of the institution was that which
now appears to us the most hideous of all human institutions, that of
slavery. Still we cannot pronounce it unnatural, for we find it, at
certain stages of their development, among all races of men; and
even constituting a regular part of the economy of certain insects. In
Europe it is difficult to believe that some of the early advances of
society could have been made without its aid. It belongs to that stage
when wealth, which gives the leisure which makes any degree of
intellectual culture possible, can only be secured by binding down
the many to compulsory toil for the few, and giving to them all that
the many can produce in excess of the absolute necessaries of
existence. The Homeric chieftain was the product of this
arrangement. So were the highly-cultured Greeks of the age of
Pericles. It was the same with the governing class in the period of
Roman greatness. It is, in one view, a very complete form of the
institution, because it embraces every member of the community,
from the top to the bottom. It divides society into two castes,
assigning to one leisure, culture, the use of arms, government; to the
other, denying them all participation in these advantages and
employments, it assigns absolute subjection, labour, and bare
subsistence. The history of this institution is very instructive. It shows
how, in human affairs, circumstances rule and decide the question of
expediency; and even that it is impossible to predicate of matters of
this kind good or evil absolutely. Here, at all events, is something (it
is, in fact, the very mould in which a community is cast,) which at one
time builds up society, and at another overthrows it; which at one
time is the cause and instrument of progress, and at other times
retards, or reverses it; which, under some conditions, is not
unfavourable to morality, and is under others immoral and
demoralizing.
Of all these arrangements, then, we may suppose that they were,
in their respective times, necessary and useful. They appear to
belong to early and transitional stages of society, and not, if there be,
or ever is to be, such a state, to its maturity. They mean either that
every member of society is not yet fit to be trusted; or that society
cannot yet afford to endow all its members with freedom and power,
and that, under such circumstances, more or less rigid restriction is
an indispensable condition of life and growth.
The abolition of slavery is the recognition, morally and logically—
though, of course, not always practically and politically: it must,
however, always work in this direction—of the axioms ‘that all men
are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; and that among these are life, liberty, and
pursuit of happiness.’
In India the word for caste signifies colour. The castes are the
colours. This connects the institution with conquest. Probably in
Egypt it had the same origin. We have seen that it might have had.
But this could not have maintained it through thousands of years.
Nothing could have given it such vitality but its utility. Benefit of
clergy is evidence of there having been a period in the history of
modern Europe when only a very limited class was educated, and so
it became the sole depository of the knowledge of the times. As
there was such a period in the history of those who had inherited the
arts of Greece and Rome, and among them an easy style of writing,
it could not have been otherwise in old Egypt. The difficulties of
maintaining knowledge must at that time have been very great; and,
as all knowledge was more or less connected with religion (religion,
indeed, then meaning the organization of the knowledge of the
community for the regulation of its life and action), it naturally fell into
the keeping of the priests, who could see no advantage in
communicating it to the profane vulgar. It was their patrimony, their
inheritance. This at once preserved it, and constituted its guardians a
caste. The existence of one such caste would make the general
introduction of the system throughout the community natural and
easy. It was obviously in such times the best way of maintaining the
knowledge of every art, as well as of religion itself. It also endowed
society with a fixity and order nothing else could impart to it. Every
man in the community was born to a certain definite condition and
occupation, of which nothing could divest him, and which he never
could abandon. This utterly extinguished all motives for, and almost
the very idea of, insurrections and revolutions.
Such a state of society had, of course, certain easily-seen
disadvantages, but it also had certain very considerable advantages.
The chief of these was that just adverted to, that society, having paid
the penalty of the restrictions and losses the system imposed,
advanced with internal peace and order. These, when the system
had once been disturbed, could never again be attained till society
had arrived at the opposite, that is the Chinese or American,
extreme, in which there is abolished, as far as possible, every
vestige of the old system, even what might be called the natural and
uninstituted caste of the ignorant. Caste throughout from top to
bottom, or caste nowhere, equally ensures domestic quiet. All
between, every form of the partial application of the system, carries
within itself the germs of social disquiet, dissatisfaction, and disorder.
The history of all countries has been hitherto very much a history of
caste. This is a point which has not been sufficiently kept in sight.
The picture of social order maintained in ancient Egypt for several
thousand years, as in India, astonishes us. Universal caste explain
the phenomenon. There was nothing in the bosom of those great
communities to suggest recourse to arms, except the occasional
occurrence of religious innovations, or of dynastic rivalries.
 CHAPTER XXXIV.
PERSISTENCY OF CUSTOM IN THE EAST.

Meddle not with them that are given to change.—Book of Proverbs.

Every traveller in the East is struck with the obstinate persistency

of forms of expression even, as well as of customs, he meets with. In
bargaining in the Khan Khaleel Bazaar, at Cairo, for an amber
mouthpiece for a pipe, I had to go through the very dialogue which
passed between Ephron and Abraham. I objected to the price. ‘Nay,
then,’ replied the modern Hittite, ‘I give it thee. Take it, I give it thee.’
At last the price was agreed upon, and he took his money. Some
time afterwards, at Jaffa, I noticed that a roguish hanger-on for odd
jobs at the hotel was using precisely the same words, in an attempt
he was making to get a friend I was with to give him for a box of
oranges ten times the price they were selling at in the market, only a
couple of hundred yards off. I was struck with the coincidence, and,
on mentioning the matter to one familiar with the ways of the East, I
learnt that this pretended gratuitous offer of the article represented a
regular recognized stage in the form of bargaining. For three
thousand years, at all events, it has been in stereotype.
Marriages are arranged now, as was that of Isaac and Rebekah,
without the principals having seen each other.
Women in the East to-day wear the veil just as they did in the time
of the Patriarchs.
The shoes are still taken off on entering holy places. The
worshipper, in praying, still turns his face in the direction of the great
sanctuary of his religion.
“Jezebel stimmied her eyes.” So the Septuagint version has it.
This translation was made at Alexandria by Jews. Their own wives
and daughters had made them familiar with the practice, and with
the word technically used to express it; and they very naturally and
properly adopted the technical term in their translation. They again
used it in the parallel passage of Ezekiel. The rendering in our
English Bible of this incident in Jezebel’s last toilet is misleading. It
makes her “paint her face.” This suggests the rouge-pot and the
cheeks, instead of the kohl-stick and the eyes. On the monuments
we see that the ladies of old Egypt had the same practice. In the
streets of the Cairo of to-day you find that the ladies of modern Egypt
have retained it. The object of the practice is two-fold—to give
prominency to the eyes, the most expressive feature, and to make
the complexion of the face, by the effect of the contrast with the thus
deepened darkness of the eyes, appear somewhat fairer.
The history of Joseph, I might almost call it the Josephead, the
more distinctly to indicate my meaning, wears very much the
appearance of an episode in a great national epic cycle, which had
been handed down from the legendary age, and which must have
been, as is still the case with oriental romances, in form prose,
though in style and spirit full of dramatic force and poetry. I can
imagine the men and children sitting at the tent-door, and the women
within, to hear its recital. Just such histories are now recited daily
throughout the East. While their incidents interest and entrance the
imagination, they teach history, morality, and religion. How pleasingly
do the high moral aims of this story of Joseph, so simple and natural,
so true and profound, contrast with the frivolous, mawkish, false,
sensational sentimentality of the modern novel! Its ideas, style, form,
and colouring supply almost a collective illustration of the obstinate
persistency we are noticing in everything oriental. With the exception
of slavery, which, in deference to the ideas and feelings of the
Christian world, has lately been abolished by law in Egypt—though I
understand the law is very imperfectly observed—this history may be
read to-day just as if its object were to give a picture of the thought,
feelings, and practices of modern Egyptian life. If its dialogue, and all
its minutiæ of detail, were heard for the first time at the date of the
Exodus, it would still possess a very remote antiquity. It is, however,
curious that we have every particular of Joseph’s adventure with
Potiphar’s wife in the story of the ‘Two Brothers,’ the only Egyptian
romance we have recovered, and the papyrus manuscript of which is
somewhat older, at least, than the Exodus; for it was written, or
edited, by Kagabu, one of the nine literati attached to the household
of Rameses the Great, for the instruction of the crown-prince,
Meneptha, in whose reign the Exodus took place.
Jusuf, by the way, is one of the commonest names in Egypt.
Among others of this name I met with was a lad, the most beautiful
boy I saw in the East, who had been, I was told, donkey-boy to the
Prince of Wales at Thebes, and who served me in that capacity on
one of my visits to Karnak. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses,
David, and Solomon, of course in their Arabic forms, are all very
common names. They must have been introduced at the time of the
Mahomedan invasion, unless the Christian invasion had brought
them in some centuries earlier.
The modern Egyptians’ ideas of unclean things and persons, of
the obligation of washing hands before meals, and their practice,
while eating, of sitting round the dish and dipping into it, were, we
know, very much the same among the Hebrews.
The serpent charmer still charms the adder, as in the Psalmist’s
day, with neither more nor less of wisdom.
It was an enactment of the law given by Moses, that if a poor man
pawned his clothes, they should be returned to him at sunset, that he
might have something to sleep in. So is it with the modern Arab; he
passes the night in the clothes he had worn during the day.
Hospitality, the treatment of women, the relation of the sexes,
respect for age and for learning, belief in dreams, the arbitrary
character of the government, indifference to human suffering,
absence of repugnance to take human life, and, indeed, almost all
that goes to constitute what is distinctive in the life of a people, is the
same now in the East as it was in the earliest days of which we have
any record. Some differences, however, and not unimportant ones,
are obvious at a glance—as, for instance, that in the organization of
society, and the well-being of its members, there has been great and
lamentable retrogression. For this our good friends, the Turks, are in
no small degree responsible.