组织污名研究的兴起、现状与未来研究方向

Organizational Stigma Research:Emergence,Current Development,and Future Directions

作为一种消极的社会评价,组织污名普遍存在于社会中且破坏力巨大。虽然近些年越来越多的学者开始关注和探索组织污名的生成机理和管理策略,然而现有组织污名的研究还非常零散,尚未形成统一的理论框架。本文借助于梳理过去多年组织污名研究文献,致力于回答以下几个问题:当前组织污名研究的理论框架与贡献是什么?社交媒体时代组织污名研究应该关注的重点和方向是什么?本文的贡献在于不仅系统地梳理了组织污名研究的脉络与理论框架,更在于指出社交媒体时代开展组织污名研究的方向与重点。

Organizational stigma is a label that evokes a collective stakeholder group's specific perception that an organization possesses a fundamental,deep-seated flaw that deindividuates and discredits the organization.As a negative social evaluation,organizational stigma with substantial destructive power is prevalent in society.While more and more scholars have started to care about and explore the creation process and management strategies of organizational stigma,the current studies are still very scattered and lack of integrated theoretical framework.Furthermore,prior studies are usually embedded in the context of traditional media.However,social media,with features of the high speed of information generation and dissemination,high emotional and moral based,and the strong interactions between organizations and audiences,will largely change the creation process and management strategies of organizational stigma,thus leading to the need of reconsidering the future research directions of organizational stigma.To fill the above gaps,this study fully examines 51 studies conducted in Chinese and western contexts,propose an integrated theoretical framework of organizational stigma,and point out several directions for future research.After analyzing the current studies,we find that organizational stigma research mainly focuses on four questions:(1)the definition of organizational stigma.Organizational stigma that differs from other social evaluation concepts such as illegitimacy,bad reputation,and low status,is categorized into two types:core-stigma that results from the discredited and tainted perception of organizations owing to some core organizational attributes,such as core routines,core outputs,and/or core customers,and event stigma that results from discrete,anomalous,episodic events;(2)the creation process of organizational stigma.Organizational stigma arises through individual-level and collective-level labeling and attribution processes that links an organization to a negatively evaluated category.In particular,the stigma context,and the traits of stigma makers,stigmatized organization,and stigma sources will influence the stigma creation process;(3)the outcome of organizational stigma.While most of prior studies have demonstrated that stigma has brought negative effects for organization and its various stakeholders,some recent studies have argued that stigma may brought positive outcomes like attracting audiences'attention or strengthening organizational identity;(4)the management strategies of organizational stigma.We find that strategies of shielding,straddling,co-opting,and categorization rebuilding are used to manage core stigma,and strategies of deny and voidance as well asacceptance and take responsibility are used to manage event stigma.Based on the current theoretical framework,we argue that the widespread social media that has turbo-charged the volume,variety and velocity of information generation and dissemination will significantly affect the creation process and management strategies of organizational stigma and proposed three directions for future research.First,social media makes it easier to track audiences'social evaluations on stigmatized organizations,which offers a good opportunity for future research to unpack the black box of stigma creation process.For instance,future research could explore the emotions experienced and roles played by various audiences in stigmatization process of organizations.Second,in the era of social media,information asymmetry between companies and their audiences has been largely reduced,which leads to the fact that the stigma management strategies(e.g.shielding or straddling)based on information asymmetry will no longer be applicable.Thus,future research could examine the boundary conditions of previous stigma management strategies and explore new and more effective stigma management strategies in the era of social media.Further,previous research on stigma management strategies usually focuses on organizations'actions and ignore the responses of various audiences.However,in the era of social media,any behavior of an organization can be perceived by the audience in time,and audiences'response will affect the subsequent implementation of stigma management strategy.Therefore,future research should examine the interactions between organizations'stigma management strategies and various audiences'responses to reveal the dynamic process of stigma management.Third,exploring organizational stigma in the era of social media thus requires methodologies that are sensitive to the flow of information about audiences and stigmatized organizations.For instances,future research could conduct increasing sophisticated techniques for automated sentiment analysis and social network analysis to precisely track the content and diffusion of stigma evaluations in social media in order to examine how organizational stigma is created in the first place,and then unpack the dynamic process of managing such stigmas.To sum up,as a typical negative social evaluation,organizational stigma research is gradually growing into a new and important research field.Through a comprehensive review and analysis of the existing literature,this paper puts forward a theoretical framework for the study of organizational stigma,and provides several directions for future research,which promotes the further development of organizational stigma research in the era of social media.