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Comments on Stigma Versus Legitimacy

Interest in the study of negative social evaluations is increasing (e.g., Devers, Dewett, Mishina, & Belsito, 2009; Hampel & Tracey, 2019; Helms & Patterson, 2014; Hudson & Okhuysen, 2009; Semadini, Cannella, Fraser, & Lee, 2008; Tracey & Philips, 2016; Vergne, 2012). Given that not so long ago, there was a dearth of research on the subject, it is encouraging to see so much interesting research devoted to studying the antecedents and consequences of negative social evaluations. At the same time, however, we are concerned that the influx of new research runs the risk of blurring the boundaries between similar but theoretically distinct constructs. Although the integration of different streams of research can generate rich theorizing and advance our understanding in meaningful ways, we suggest that the surge of interest in negative social evaluations has created the need to distinguish and clarify the boundaries and relationships between similar constructs, in particular, legitimacy, illegitimacy, and organizational stigma. The two papers in the dialog piece confront this issue head on. On one hand, Hampel and Tracy advance the intriguing and provocative notion that organizational stigma resides at the far negative end of a spectrum of moral evaluation, with legitimacy and elevation at the opposite end. On the other hand, Helms, Patterson, and Hudson (2019, p. 3) argue that equating organizational “stigma to the broader, more generalized, construct as legitimacy’s opposite is fundamentally flawed.” Our belief is that although the construct of illegitimacy, if it existed, and organizational stigma might possibly share some characteristics, it is not entirely clear that it is necessarily useful or appropriate to equate the two. In this response, we examine these constructs, to delineate the differences among them. Our argument is threefold. First, that keeping the two constructs separate is not likely to prevent scholars from studying the complex interrelationships between the two; second, that subsuming stigma within institutional analyses is not necessarily likely to help our understanding of stigmas; finally, that the illegitimacy and stigma constructs differ in important enough ways to make them difficult to combine them in meaningful ways. One argument that Hampel and Tracey (2019) make for placing moral illegitimacy and stigma on a single continuum of moral evaluation is that it would allow scholars to explore “how audiences incorporate the various evaluations of other stakeholders in making their own judgments” rather than study “specific judgments (e.g., stigmatization) in isolation” (p. 15). Although this is indeed a worthy endeavor, a single continuum is unnecessary for studying multiple types of social evaluations. Indeed, although status, reputation, and celebrity are all built on different theoretical bases and do not exist on a single continuum, scholars have nonetheless been able to distinguish between the joint and independent effects of status and reputation on receiving bids to the NCAA (The National Collegiate Athletic Association) basketball tournament (Washington & Zajac, 2005), how status and reputation affects the selection of auditors (Jensen & Roy, 2008), how status and reputation affect NBA (The National Basketball Association) team quality and revenues (Ertug & Castellucci, 2013), and how firm celebrity and reputation affect both the likelihood and reactions to a firm having an earnings surprise (Pfarrer, Pollock, & Rindova, 2010). As these, and undoubtedly other, studies show, social evaluations do not need to be on the same continuum to be studied together. Second, equating stigma with the highest level of moral illegitimacy would necessarily entail subsuming stigma research under the broader umbrella of institutional research. As numerous scholars, and even a cursory familiarity with the organizational literature will reveal, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of institutional theory and institutional research more broadly to organizational theorists, sociologists, and strategy scholars given both its ubiquity and the important contributions and insights that have arisen from institutional studies (e.g., Greenwood, Oliver, Sahlin, & Suddaby, 2008; Haveman & David, 2008). At the same time, however, institutional arguments have been “used to explain a wide range of phenomena and was used in combination with many other perspectives.” (Haveman & David, 790898 JMIXXX10.1177/1056492618790898Journal of Management InquiryDevers and Mishina research-article2018