How markets evolve is a perennial and important question in business. Building on a large qualitative dataset on the coffee market comprising primary and secondary interviews, archival data, and fieldwork, the authors introduce a novel theoretical mechanism—practice expansion—to explain how ongoing institutional complexity fosters market evolution. To theorize practice expansion, the authors combine institutional logics with resource partitioning and introduce a two-by-two typology of firms evolving in markets: craft vs. commercial and generalist vs. specialist. The authors’ analysis, grounded in this typology, identifies three mechanisms that explain practice expansion (elaboration, translation, and transformation). The authors then show how practice expansion contributes to market evolution by increasing product diversity, broadening skills and knowledge, and enriching the market meaning system. The novel theory introduced in this article contributes to extant work by theorizing market evolution as resulting from practice expansion, and by broadening our understanding of the types of firms and their interactions important to that evolution. The novel theory also points to important strategy implications for how different types of firms can contribute to and benefit from the identified evolutionary patterns and ongoing institutional complexity.

市场如何演变是商业中一个长期且重要的问题。基于咖啡市场的大型定性数据集，包括初级和次级访谈、档案数据和实地调查，作者引入了一种新的理论机制——实践扩展——来解释持续的制度复杂性如何促进市场演变。为了将实践扩展理论化，作者将制度逻辑与资源划分相结合，并介绍了在市场中演变的公司的 2×2 类型：工艺与商业以及通才与专家。作者的分析基于这种类型，确定了解释实践扩展的三种机制（精化、翻译和转换）。然后，作者展示了实践扩展如何通过增加产品多样性来促进市场发展，拓宽技能和知识，丰富市场意义体系。本文介绍的新理论通过理论化由实践扩展导致的市场演变，并通过拓宽我们对公司类型及其对这种演变重要的相互作用的理解，为现有工作做出了贡献。这一新颖的理论还指出了不同类型的公司如何为已确定的进化模式和持续的制度复杂性做出贡献并从中受益的重要战略意义。