Exploiting Bad Behaviors: Stigma and the Space for Innovation

Abstract

Building on importance that peripheral niches play in the process of innovation, and incorporating the proposition that audiences perceive stigma as an aversive social condition, this paper suggests that understanding, maintaining, and developing stigma can help innovators effectively develop space for radical innovation. Three interdependent mechanisms explain this emergent process. First, innovators benefit from the dissociation inherent to stigma, allowing safe distance from homogenizing audiences, norms, and institutions that might undermine their radical ideas. Second, actors use diversity in stigma impressions to signal to supportive stakeholders who see past naïve interpretations of “bad” behaviors and recognize the value underlying second-order interpretations. Finally, underpinning the push and pull of relevant audiences is a process of engaging with moral emotions, using their ability to motivate behavioral change in support of radical innovation. An in-depth case study examining the rise of Punk music in the 1970s helps illustrate a process model where marginalized actors come to understand and profit from stigma’s divergent influence over both detractors and supporters. Together this research outlines the social functional benefits of stigma in oppressive contexts, suggesting disadvantaged actors can usurp control over pernicious evaluations to fashion a supportive niche for radical innovation.