Stigmatization in and Around Organizations

Stigma is a discrediting attribute that significantly diminishes the bearer in the eyes of various audiences. While early stigma research focused predominantly on individuals facing stigmas, the perspective of stigma has expanded to encompass organizations, categories, and industries. Extant research on stigma in and around organizations has provided valuable insights into three aspects: the sources, characteristics, and management of stigma. To begin, there are six distinctive sources of stigma: physical, tribal, moral, servile, emotional, and associational. In addition, five distinctive characteristics of stigma are concealability, controllability, centrality, disruptiveness, and malleability. Not surprisingly, management and organization scholars have devoted more attention to the strategies and tactics used to combat, deflect, or cope with stigma. They have developed six common types of stigma management strategies: dilution, information management, boundary management, cooptation, emotion work, and reconstruction. These six strategies and their derivative tactics can be categorized into four broad approaches: lose it, conceal it, use it, or reshape it. Moreover, scholars have just started to explore broader processes of stigmatization in and around organizations—that is, the emergence, removal, and transfer of stigma. Stigma is not a dichotomous evaluation but, instead, involves a continuum with a middle range of ambivalence between two extremes. Although in the cases of stigma emergence and stigma removal the stigmatization processes eventually gravitate toward one end of the stigma continuum, the unfolding of these processes is not straightforward and often oscillates along the continuum between totally stigmatized and non-stigmatized. The middle range of ambivalence is partially attributable to the multidimensional nature of stigmatization such that a target is often partially, rather than entirely, (de)stigmatized. In exploring these dynamic processes of stigmatization, scholars tend to adopt a multi-stakeholder perspective and highlight the role of the institutional environment. Future research is warranted to further unpack the dynamic relationships between stigma and other social evaluations, such as reputation, status, and trust—particularly, how these other social evaluations impact the processes of stigmatization and how they together contribute to the governance of institutions. Moreover, the literature will benefit from a deeper exploration of the ideological embeddedness of stigmatization. Ideological stigma will not only encourage various stakeholders to balance moral and pragmatic considerations but also render the processes of stigmatization more complex and challenging.