Studies of illegitimate organizations have failed to present consistent definitions and to recognize that illegitimate organizations persist. Drawing on the emerging organizational stigma literature, I separate recoverable event-stigma from nonrecoverable core-stigma—an extreme form of the poorly defined construct of illegitimacy. I examine the nature of core-stigma, the role of conflicting external audience evaluations that determine and express this stigma, and some organizational outcomes and responses. I end by proposing some implications for building a greater understanding of these and other illegitimate organizations and a possible agenda for future research.

AbstractOrganizational scholars have treated emotions mostly as an individual‐level phenomenon, with limited theorisation of emotions as an important component in social embeddedness. In this review essay, we argue for the need for a toolkit to study emotions as an inherently social phenomenon. To do so, we apply insights from sociology that have been under‐utilized in management and organization research. We focus on three sociological concepts: collective emotions and social bonds, emotional energy and moral batteries, and emotional capital. We then develop an integrative model of emotional embeddedness to emphasize that emotions are socially constructed and socially authorized. We end the paper by setting out a research agenda for more research in management and organization that is informed by these three concepts.

We examine how organizations that suffer core stigma—disapproval for their core attributes—survive. We explain how men's bathhouses avoid negative attention and minimize the transfer of stigma to their network partners, including customers, suppliers, and regulators, through careful management of their business activities. Using observational, archival, and interview data across different institutional environments, we find that, in response to suffering core stigma, men's bathhouses use a variety of strategies to shield their partners depending, in part, on the level of hostility that they face in their environment. Our work contributes to the emerging literature on organization-level stigma, especially by focusing on how core-stigmatized organizations are able to survive and by drawing attention to the special problem of stigma transfer. Our findings also focus attention on the use of legitimacy in organization studies and call for further examinations of core-stigmatized and other illegitimate organizations to expand our theoretical domain to the fullest range of organizational processes and outcomes.

We study the emotive aspect of institutional work performed by U.S. animal rights organizations (AROs) attempting to disrupt industrial practices in modern factory farming operations perceived to be abusive to animals. Drawing on an inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews with ARO advocates, as well as textual and visual archival data collected from AROs' websites, we argue that the suppression of emotion plays a critical role in AROs' disruptive work. We find that advocates are motivated to suppress their emotions by a perceived incompatibility between their reactive emotional displays and their affective commitment to institutional work, or what we label reactive-affective conflict. We show how two triggers of reactive-affective conflict-potential supporters' investment in the status quo and emotive norms governing institutional work-encourage ARO advocates to suppress their emotions in face-to-face interactions with audiences while attempting to elicit emotions via visuals as their strategy of disruptive work. We contribute to the literature on the strategic use of emotion in institutional work by highlighting important relationships between the characteristics of potential supporters, the nature of institutional work, and institutional workers' management of their own emotions to further their institutional projects. In doing so, we add needed nuance to extant conceptualizations of how emotion is strategically deployed as part of purposeful efforts to create, maintain, and disrupt institutions.

We theorize the role in institutional processes of what we call the “shame nexus,” a set of shame-related constructs: felt shame, systemic shame, sense of shame, and episodic shaming. As a discrete emotion, felt shame signals to a person that a social bond is at risk, and it catalyzes a fundamental motivation to preserve valued bonds. Systemic shame we conceptualize as a form of disciplinary power, animated by persons' sense of shame—a mechanism of ongoing intersubjective surveillance and self-regulation. We theorize how the duo of systemic shame and sense of shame drives the self-regulation that underpins persons' conformity to institutional prescriptions and institutional reproduction. We conceptualize episodic shaming as a form of juridical power used by institutional guardians to elicit renewed conformity and reassert institutional prescriptions, and also explain how episodic shaming may have unintended effects, including institutional disruption and recreation, when it triggers sensemaking among targets and observers that can lead to the reassessment of the appropriateness of institutional prescriptions or the value of social bonds. We link the shame nexus to three broad categories of institutional work.