How to turn a brand's friends (and detractors) into evangelists: The case of Canadian wine

With conversion rituals, cool-climate wineries in Ontario managed to overcome a reputation for low quality, write Felipe G. Massa, Wesley Helms, Maxim Voronov and Liang Wan

Introduction: A Dialog on Stigma Versus Legitimacy, and How They Relate to Organizations and Their Actors

International audienceRecently, stigma research has reached an important threshold in management literature. With an increasing number of publications on the topic of stigma and related social evaluations, researchers run the risk of convoluting disparate concepts. At the same time, examining different components of a singular social evaluation can result in unique contributions that might be overlooked if not thoroughly unpacked. This dialogue presents two differing perspectives on the social evaluations of stigma and legitimacy. The authors discuss the merit of examining stigma as its own distinct construct and as a component of moral evaluation. The authors engage previous research to provide insights on the origins, antecedents, outcomes, processes and consequences of stigma from two different perspectives. Finally, established stigma researchers provide insight into the debate, drawing on previous research as well as their own foundational work

Let’s Not “Taint” Stigma Research With Legitimacy, Please

International audienceWe propose that stigma and legitimacy are distinct constructs. Drawing from extant research, empirical observations, and the theoretical assumptions of both constructs we assert that, in spite of increasing efforts to equate stigma as illegitimacy, the opposite of legitimacy, that it is not. Specifically, we argue that organizations and their actors can be both stigmatized and legitimate at the same time. With this recognized, we propose a stigma-focused research agenda, separate from - and untainted by - legitimacy. Further, we propose an agenda that broadens conceptualizations of audiences and their dynamics, addresses how normal “deviants” take action in the face of stigma, and reconceptualises how audiences and the stigmatized interact

Standing on the Shoulders of Goffman: Advancing a Relational Research Agenda on Stigma

Peer reviewed: TrueDrawing from Goffman’s original observations on stigma and the consequences of interactions between the stigmatized and supportive or stigmatizing audiences, we conduct a 20-year review of the diverse literature on stigma to revisit the collective nature of stigmatization processes. We find that studies on stigma’s origins, responses, processes, and outcomes have diverged from Goffman’s relational view of stigma as they have overlooked important relational mechanisms explaining the processes of (de)stigmatization. We draw from those conclusions to justify the need to study stigma as a collective phenomenon. We develop a relational perspective on stigma based on understanding how attributes are stigmatized (or not) by audiences in their interactions. We argue that to advance stigma research, it is necessary to build on Goffman’s theory to include the stigmatizers (i.e., the normal) and supporters (i.e., the wise); how they create, sustain, or remove stigma; and how they relate to the stigmatized (i.e., the targets). Accordingly, we provide a research agenda on stigma as a collective phenomenon that theorizes a relational perspective, proposes a typology of how audiences relate to stigmatization, and identifies patterns of relations between audiences. We thus offer a missing piece to existing accounts of stigma by focusing on the key role of audiences (i.e., stigmatizers or supporters of the stigmatized) rather than on the targets of stigma (i.e., the own)