Exploring The Dynamic Interrelationships Between Stigmatization and Legitimation in Social Media

Abstract

Stigmatization of organizations can threaten their sheer existence. However, despite being stigmatized, organizations often survive and even thrive, indicating that they are, in fact, legitimized. With this article we study the dynamic interrelationship between stigmatization and legitimation processes during a series of scandals in the financial sector. We adopt a communication-based audience perspective and analyse how audiences transform legitimizing conversations through targeted labelling, vilifying, and mobilising against banks in social media. We observe how this stigmatization process reinforces itself through a vicious loop, and later becomes diluted through the re-emergence of legitimizing conversations that render banks as a broader legitimate business category, yet how partial stigmatization remains. Our analysis based on 2.8 million tweets contributes to our understanding of stigma emergence and dilution based on an exploration of the complex interrelationship between stigmatization and legitimation in the so far little understood social media arena of Twitter.