We identify value narratives as stories that promote certain product or service attributes as benefits within the marketplace. We show how value narratives reflect benefit attributes that align with alternative versus mainstream market settings. Our empirical focus is local food value narratives within a common local food system with alternative settings being farmers’ markets and mainstream settings being supermarkets. Farmers’ market and supermarket purveyors choose which benefit characteristics to emphasize throughout narrative curation, enabling us to witness strategic narrative use, or what we term narrative stewardship. We find that multiple value narratives express an array of ‘local food’ benefits in ways that create a contested marketplace. Narrative deployment at farmers’ markets is guided by an amalgam of institutional perspectives, while narrative use at supermarkets is dominated by a market institutional perspective. We identify a continuum of value narrative stewardship (promotion-neglect) within farmers’ markets that leaves the meaning and value of ‘local food’ vulnerable to mainstream market appropriation via narrative voidance, dilution, and replacement. We propose strategies for better value narrative stewardship.

我们将价值叙事识别为将某些产品或服务属性宣传为市场利益的故事。我们展示了价值叙述如何反映与替代市场环境和主流市场环境相一致的利益属性。我们的实证重点是在一个共同的地方食品系统中的地方食品价值叙述，替代设置是农贸市场，主流设置是超市。农贸市场和超市供应商选择在整个叙事策划中强调哪些利益特征，使我们能够见证战略性叙事使用，或我们所说的叙事管理。我们发现，多种价值叙述以创造竞争市场的方式表达了一系列“当地食品”的好处。农贸市场的叙事部署受到制度观点的综合指导，而超市的叙事使用则以市场制度视角为主。我们确定了农贸市场内价值叙事管理（促销-忽视）的连续统一体，这使得“当地食品”的意义和价值容易通过叙事空洞、淡化和替代被主流市场挪用。我们提出了更好的价值叙事管理策略。