Kevin Roy

I'm a PhD candidate researching market practices, market-shaping, institutional work, and entrepreneurship in contemporary craft industries.

My work focuses on how actors in Ontario’s artisanal bakery, craft beer, and jewellery design-making industries navigate challenges and opportunities as they grow their businesses and shape their markets.

I’m particularly interested in these entrepreneurs' economic and non-economic motivations and in the collective, prosocial, and cooperative practices that are often present in craft entrepreneurship and market-building.

My research integrates economic and cultural geography, lifestyle and craft entrepreneurship, market-as-practice theory, institutional work studies, and coopetition research.

I approach these industries with a critical lens. While craft markets are often presented as sites of cultural production and sustainability, I recognize that these spaces also (re)produce exclusivity, inequity, and precarity.

Publications

Roy, K. (2024). Institutional work and institutional entrepreneurship in the Ontario craft beer industry. ZFW–Advances in Economic Geography, 68(2), 97-110.

Roy, K., & Bathelt, H. (2024). Making the Ontario craft beer market. Regional Studies, 2435517.