Organizational Stigma and the Practice and Meaning of Work: When Work Becomes Dirty

Abstract

Beyond the secondary stigmatization thesis—that organizational members in stigmatized organizations can themselves experience stigmatization—we know little about how organizational stigma affects the internal lives of organizations. Where organizations are stigmatized due to events, blameworthiness has been offered as an explanation for why stigma transfers initially to the organizational leadership—for example, top executives. We examine the existing literature’s assumptions about the transfer of stigma in an event-stigmatized organization by inductively exploring how event stigma impacts group relations and work. Our research context is a public broadcasting company that became stigmatized when it lost its journalistic independence. We find that what has been depicted as an intrinsic “transfer” of stigma to responsible units in event-stigmatized organizations is in fact highly contentious, with groups vying against one another to exert control over the practice of journalism in the hopes of implementing their own vision. The internal struggle fundamentally transformed the practice and meaning of work in the journalism units of this organization, turning the work into something “dirty” for some workers. Our findings contribute to the understanding of organizational stigma as a contested phenomenon in contrast to its earlier conceptualization as a relatively stable category, and to the understanding of the conditions under which the practice and meaning of work can be transformed in event-stigmatized organizations.