While organizational stigma has emerged as an important and vibrant area of study, yet the processes of stigmatization have not been as thoroughly examined. Specifically, this study explores the ...subsequent, ongoing stigmatization processes beyond stigma emergence that are triggered by stigma transfer. To do so, we draw on a qualitative case study of an American university selling the naming rights of its newly built football stadium to a company that runs for-profit prisons with a history of human rights violations. We find that the stigma transfer through an exposed association can lead to amplifying stigmatization of both the source and target organizations, featuring a reverberation process fueled by both rhetorical and material stigmatizing practices. Even after the stigmatizing association ceased, stigmatization of the target organization, though muffled, lingered and required further management. Through developing a model of amplifying and muffling stigmatization after stigma transfer, we offer contributions to scholarship on ongoing stigmatization and stigma transfer. We also open the opportunity to understand the temporal dimensions of stigmatization.
The availability and quality of instrumental variables (IV) are frequent concerns in empirical management research when trying to overcome endogeneity problems. For endogeneity that does not arise ...from sample selection, management scholars have recently started to apply the Gaussian Copula (GC) approach as an alternative to IV regression. Although the GC approach has various promising features, its limitations and usefulness in a management context are still not fully understood. We discuss the GC approach as a flexible, instrument-free approach to correct for endogeneity and examine its suitability for applied management research. We use simulations to explore the limitations and practical usefulness of the GC approach relative to ordinary least squares (OLS), IV regression, and a Higher Moments (HM) estimator by simulating the impact of different degrees of violation of the key underlying assumptions of the GC approach. We show that the GC approach can recover the true parameters remarkably well if all of its assumptions are met but that its absolute and relative performance in terms of parameter recovery and estimation precision can deteriorate quickly if these assumptions are violated. This is of particular concern as some of these assumptions are not testable and violations of them are likely in many empirical management contexts. Based on our results, we provide a series of recommendations and practical guidelines for scholars who consider using the GC approach when dealing with endogeneity.
Many companies prominently espouse their virtuous character in communications with investors, with a view toward influencing investor perceptions about the firm’s standards of behavior. While there ...are benefits to investors perceiving an organization to be virtuous, what happens if the firm violates those standards by engaging in unethical behavior? In this study, we use expectancy violations theory to argue that virtue rhetoric sets investors up for disappointment. When an organization claims to be virtuous but then acts unethically, investors respond to the ethics violation more negatively than they would otherwise. We also theorize about scenarios where investors may overlook unethical behavior or intensify their disapproval of it. To test our ideas, we assemble a unique sample of unethical events committed by S&P 500 companies over a 12-year period, combined with analysis of the virtue rhetoric found in their annual letters to shareholders. Our main finding is that investor reaction to unethical behavior is more negative for companies that claimed to be virtuous prior to the violation than for those that did not make such claims. This relationship is less strong when the company has high expected future value.
Infants generate basic expectations about their physical and social environment. This early knowledge allows them to identify opportunities for learning, preferring to explore and learn about objects ...that violate their prior expectations. However, less is known about how expectancy violations about people's actions influence infants' subsequent learning from others and about others. Here, we presented 18-month-old infants with an agent who acted either efficiently (expected action) or inefficiently (unexpected action) and then labeled an object. We hypothesized that infants would prefer to learn from the agent (label-object association) if she previously acted efficiently, but they would prefer to learn about the agent (voice-speaker association) if she previously acted inefficiently. As expected, infants who previously saw the agent acting efficiently showed greater attention to the demonstrated object and learned the new label-object association, but infants presented with the inefficient agent did not. However, there was no evidence that infants learned the voice-speaker association in any of the conditions. In summary, expectancy violations about people's actions may signal a situation to avoid learning from them. We discussed the results in relation to studies on surprise-induced learning, motionese, and selective social learning, and we proposed other experimental paradigms to investigate how expectancy violations influence infants' learning about others.
Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from ...violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation. We tested the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, where there is a strong documented association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of humor. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests that humor can accompany negative emotion.
To date there have been very few studies that have sought to investigate the crimes, harms and human rights violations associated with the process of ‘extreme energy’, whereby energy extraction ...methods grow more ‘unconventional’ and intense over time as easier to extract resources are depleted. The fields of rural sociology and political science have produced important perception studies but few social impact studies. The field of ‘green criminology’, while well suited to examining the impacts of extreme energy given its focus on social and environmental ‘harms’, has produced just one citizen ‘complaint’ study to date. It is vital that more social and environmental impact studies become part of the local, national and international public policy debate. To this end, in the following paper we seek to move beyond perception studies to highlight the harms that can occur at the planning and approval stage. Indeed, while the UK is yet to see unconventional gas and oil extraction reach the production stage, as this article shows, local communities can suffer significant harms even at the exploration stage when national governments with neoliberal economic agendas are set on developing unconventional resources in the face of considerable opposition and a wealth of evidence of environmental and social harms. This paper takes a broad interdisciplinary approach, inspired by green criminological insights, that shows how a form of ‘collective trauma’ has been experienced at the exploration stage by communities in the North of England.
Over recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the costs to the environment of corporate actions. We posit that accounting comparability between a firm and its peers, facilitates firm ...learning of the impact peer firm activities have on the environment. This learning allows the firm to reduce its own environmental violations. In line with this conjecture, our findings show that accounting comparability is negatively associated with environmental violations. Further, the reduction in firm environmental violations is larger in the presence of comparable peer firms disclosing low toxic releases, suggesting that firms are better able to learn from peer firms with low environmental impact. Our results provide novel evidence that accounting comparability facilitates green learning and therefore benefits society at large by reducing environmental harm.
This article presents how DIGNITY and its partners in the Philippines applied adaptive and creative approaches to prison oversight in light of restrictions and challenges imposed by the COVID19 ...pandemic. Before the start of the pandemic, conducting effective prison oversight and engaging in constructive dialogue with prison authorities seemed highly dependent on monitors being physically present in the field. When pandemic-related restrictions were put in place, oversight bodies were unable to conduct on-site visits. This was a major challenge, especially at a time when the risk of human rights violations in prisons was heightened due to the efforts by the authorities to manage the pandemic.
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