How to Stigmatize: Inside the Fight for the Rhetorical History of the Seal Hunt

Abstract

Organizational stigma is a collective, negative, moral evaluation of an organization that results in increased threats to its survival. Within the extant literature, stigma is generally conceptualized as an organizational attribute, or something that an organization inherently is. Though researchers have thoroughly interrogated the processes by which organizations manage stigma and minimize stigma transfer to resource-granting stakeholders, we know very little about how an organization actually becomes stigmatized. What turns a negative event into a debilitating organizational label that becomes difficult to shake? Where does stigma come from and how can we distinguish it from related constructs like illegitimacy and poor reputation? By delving beneath the growing typologies of organizational stigma to examine the processes by which stigma emerges, this work demonstrates that organizational stigma is a social process that lends itself to a categorization rather than just a fixed category of organizations. In other words, stigmatized organizations are stigmatized only for as long as their stigmatizers actively stigmatize them. I examine the process of stigma emergence through the case of the stigmatization of seal hunting in Canada by animal rights social movement organizations (SMOs), beginning in the 1960s.