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We are currently facing numerous societal crises, such as the institutional trust crisis. Social evaluation scholars – who study the production, maintenance, and repair of key social evaluation concepts such as legitimacy, reputation, trust, status, celebrity, and stigma – are, in principle, uniquely positioned to address these crises. However, their expertise seems to be sought less often than that of economists and public policy scholars. We suggest that this lack of inclusion is due to a lack of conceptual clarity in social evaluation research. The confounding of key concepts leads to a fragmentation of research, inconsistencies in the definition and measurements of concepts, and ultimately limits the guidance that social evaluation scholars provide to policymakers and practitioners. Our goal in this symposium is, therefore, to bring together social evaluation scholars and discuss how we can work together to contribute more effectively to addressing societal crises, such as the current institutional trust crisis. Four distinguished social evaluation scholars will introduce a key concept in the social evaluation literature (i.e., trust, stigma, authenticity, legitimacy, and reputation) and reflect on its strengths and limitations in explaining societal crises such as the institutional trust crisis. We then use these introductions to facilitate a discussion on how social evaluation scholars can improve conceptual clarity and build bridges between the concepts. In doing so, we aim not only to develop a future research agenda for social evaluation scholars, but also to create a starting point for a discussion forum for impactful social evaluation research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of research on social evaluations have resulted in a rich body of work that illustrates how perceptual constructs, such as reputation, categories, and stigma affect key stakeholders' willingness to support or disrupt organizations. Rapid developments in the way stakeholders consume information, form judgments, and express their views about organizations have led to questions about the changing role of business in society, shifting power dynamics between stakeholders and organizations, increasing diversity and polarization of social evaluations, and growing complexity of organization-stakeholder relationships. The goal of this symposium is to discuss these questions by bringing together prominent scholars to comment on the current state and future directions of research on categorization, stigmatization, and ESG issues in management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most organizational research on stigma focuses on preexisting stigma, leaving the question "where does stigma come from?" largely unexplored. The few studies that have examined stigma emergence, position transgression as a trigger for the stigmatization process and focus mainly on the actions of external stakeholders at the expense of the agency of the stigmatized. I address these voids by explicating the process of stigma emergence in the context of the 2012 "foreign agents" law in Russia and its application to NGOs. I used an inductive approach--by relying on archival data, online sources, and interviews--to uncover deliberate attempts of the government to stigmatize select NGOs by assigning to them a newly created "foreign agent" label. I present a three-phase process model of stigma emergence and detail the iterative manner, through which the stigmatizer amended enforcement tactics as the stigmatized devised new coping strategies. The ironic outcome was that the quest to stigmatize and exert formal control over "foreign agent" NGOs led to NGOs' deformalized existence. I discuss the critical roles of power imbalance, limited action by higher authority, and low media attention during the early phase of stigma emergence. These findings may generalize to other countries with authoritarian regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over four decades of research on social approval assets highlight the benefits and liabilities of legitimacy, status, reputation, and celebrity for organizations and individual executives. While recent efforts aspire to provide clarity regarding the conceptual distinctions between the various types of social evaluations, there remain significant questions about the measurement, multilevel nature, interplay between, and practical implications of these constructs. Further, the audiences that bestow these social evaluations are becoming more diverse and difficult to manage. The complex relationship between these key audiences is compounded by the increasingly self- selected manner in which information is consumed in the internet age (i.e., social media or other internet media outlets). To address these challenges and move social evaluations research forward, this panel discussion aims to bring together prominent scholars to comment on the current state and future directions of the legitimacy, status, reputation, and celebrity research streams in light of today's increasingly complex business environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This symposium will present five papers that ask how individuals and organizations react to status changes. While the effects of status on performance and evaluation have been extensively examined in the literature, the behavioral consequences of status changes are less well studied in management research, even though these actions may further affect individual and organizational performance. The studies in the symposium all seek to make causal inferences by leveraging a variety of empirical designs and together provide evidence on how actors react to their own and their competitors' status changes, at both the individual and the organization level. Two discussants, Giada Di Stefano and Anastasiya Zavyalova, will facilitate discussions regarding these papers and future research. Michelin is Coming to Town: Examining Organizational Reactions to the Entry of an Expert Evaluator Presenter: Saverio Dave Favaron; HEC Paris Presenter: Giada Di Stefano; Bocconi U. Presenter: Rodolphe Durand; HEC Paris Motives for Feedback in Entrepreneurial Communities: The Role of Status on an Online Platform Presenter: Robert Vesco; Robert H. Smith School of Business, U. of Maryland Presenter: Bryan Kaiser Stroube; London Business School Great Minds Don't Think Alike: The Effects of Winning Awards on Stock Analysts' Herding Behaviors Presenter: Liyue Yan; Robert H. Smith School of Business, U. of Maryland Stealing Status: How Labor-Market Status Increase Firm Turnover Presenter: Justin Frake; U. of Michigan Information Availability and Reevaluation of Status Influenced Hierarchy Presenter: Siddharth Sharma; Indian School of Business [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, social media have empowered various stakeholders to voice their opinions online, connect with each other, and organize within loosely connected networks. While disciplines, such as marketing or communication science, have established research streams studying social media, the phenomenon has only recently gained attention by organization and management scholars. Despite only being in its nascence, the academic debate around social media and social evaluations is not uncontested. Accordingly, this panel aims at contributing to this relatively young debate and address questions with regard to the impact of social media for social evaluations of organizations and, more generally, social media's relevance for organization and management scholars as an object of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the considerable attention scholars have devoted to the study of celebrity in both organizational and strategic management research, conceptual, theoretical and empirical integration of this body of research remains limited. This panel symposium brings together prominent researchers to address three questions foundational to the future of research on celebrity: 1) Who are they - e.g. CEOs, entrepreneurs, organizations, 2) What do we not know yet about the celebrity construct in terms of its conceptual and empirical definitions, its antecedents and its consequences, and 3) Where do we go from here in terms of the most promising future research directions? Our hope is that this distinguished panel can begin to bring coherence to the body of literature on celebrity as a social approval asset, as well as lay the path for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A renewed discussion in organizational studies has focused on contrasting conceptualizations of organizational reputation as a more simple and generalized construct versus a more multidimensional and specific construct. We contribute to this discussion by theorizing that the nature of stakeholders' identification with an organization shapes their reputation judgments. In building our theory, we develop a typology of organizational identification and discuss how the nature of identification differs in terms of relationship scope, exit costs, and duration. We then propose that the nature of stakeholders' identifying relationship affects whether they engage in more automatic or controlled information processing modes when forming perceptions about the organization. In turn, we argue that as stakeholders develop deeper identifying relationships with organizations and engage in more controlled information processing, they will form increasingly more specific and multidimensional reputation judgments. After establishing our identification-based theory of reputation, we apply it to a specific context-stakeholder reactions to negative events. In doing so, we develop propositions about how the differences in identification and reputation assessments inform stakeholder perceptions of and reactions to different negative events. Overall, we position organizational identification as a key missing element for understanding the nature and complexity of reputation assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]