Organizational stigma: Taking stock and opening new areas for research

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Wesley Helms, Journal of Management Studies.

Why do some deviant firms get away from deviating from norms and rules and others don’t?

Organizational stigma has become central to explaining how organizations or industries become tainted, and how they overcome and manage the taint. This editorial introduces a Special Issue journal edition on organizational stigma and explores the origins of the concept, provides basic definitions and reviews the existing research on stigmatization, stigma transfer and experienced stigma.

As new contested industries emerge – from medical cannabis and artificial meat – organizational stigma could be mobilized to understand entrepreneurial intention, entry, and growth in tainted markets.

The authors hope that this editorial and issue can help consolidate existing research on organizational stigma and open new areas for contribution, both conceptually and empirically. From more traditional contexts such as international business operations and banking to less traditional ones such as television reality shows on drag queens, martial arts or kink associations, studies of organization stigmas have shown the polyvalence and theoretical usefulness of the concept.

The literature on organizational stigma is still evolving and is beginning to reach a maturation phase. Historical and multi-level perspectives have the potential to further our understanding of the precursors and outcomes of organizational stigma while in return organizational stigma could enlighten new phenomena and contexts.

Hudson, B. A., Patterson, K. D., Roulet, T. J., Helms, W. S., & Elsbach, K. (2022) Organizational stigma: Taking stock and opening new areas for research. Journal of Management Studies, 59(8), 1899-1914. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12875

Getting away with it (or not): The social control of organizational deviance

| Wesley Helms, Academy of Management Review

Organizations breaking laws and norms in the pursuit of a strategic advantage is far from new, but it has received significant attention in recent years in academic literature.

Why do some deviant firms get away with deviating from norms and rules and others don’t? These firms know how to navigate the process of social control to improve their outcomes and find people that are willing to cooperate with them.

These transgressions generally elicit the intervention of social control agents seeking to curb deviant behaviour being suppressed; in other occasions, however organizational deviance can persist and even be accepted into the very system of rule that was being challenged.

This paper advances a structured view of this process by formulating a theory of the social control of organizational deviance. The research builds upon sociological literature and classifies forms of social control based on their cooperativeness and formality and sheds light on the outcomes of social control by illustrating the conditions under which they are likely to be more or less accommodative of deviant behaviour as well as more or less permanent.

This work contributes to the scholarly understanding of the role of social control in organizational fields, as well as the advantageousness of deviant behaviour as a strategic option for organizations.

Piazza, A., Bergemann, P., & Helms, W. (2022). Getting away with it (or not): The social control of organizational deviance. Academy of Management Review https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2021.0066