Historical Narratives and the Defense of Stigmatized Industries

Andrew Smith*, Nicholas D. Wong, Anders Ravn Sørensen, Ian Jones, Diego M. Coraiola

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
76 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This study examines how managers and entrepreneurs in stigmatized industries use historical narratives to combat stigma. We examine two industries, the private military contractors (PMC) industry in the United States and the cannabis industry in Canada. In recent decades, the representatives of these industries have worked to reduce the level of stigmatization faced by the industries. We show that historical narratives were used rhetorically by the representatives of both industries. In both cases, these historical narratives were targeted at just one subset of the population. Our research contributes to debates about stigmatization in ideologically diverse societies, an important issue that have been overlooked by the existing literature on stigmatized industries, which tends to assume the existence of homogeneous audiences when researching the efforts of industry representatives to destigmatize their industries.
Original languageEnglish
Article number105649262110194
Pages (from-to)386-404
Number of pages19
JournalJournal of Management Inquiry
Volume31
Issue number4
Early online date10 Jun 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2022

Keywords

  • attitudes
  • business & government
  • business & society
  • stigma

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Historical Narratives and the Defense of Stigmatized Industries'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this