Positioning as Strategic Balance: The Case of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)—A Structured Abstract

Abstract

“Minister of Magic”—this is how the new British health chief, Jeremy Hunt, was dubbed by the UK mainstream media in 2012, because 5 years-ago he signed a Parliamentary motion in support of homeopathy. Prominent scientists spoke up that this is a bad omen as belief in science and homeopathy is incompatible (Cheng 2012). This is an example of widespread societal attitudes in the Western world towards homeopathy and Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). At the same time, the market for CAM services continues to grow (Eardleya et al. 2012). The World Health Organization estimates that 70–80 % of the population in many developed countries has used some form of CAM (WHO 2002). Thus, although CAM is a market category swathed in legitimacy challenges, it experiences an increasing demand. This prompts the question of how CAM organizations address legitimacy issues while expanding category demand. Specifically, our theoretical proposition is that organizations in a marginalized/new category would be searching for legitimacy and differentiation across categories in contrast to a stable category where this search occurs within the category.