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for their help in developing and refining this work. I owe a special thanks to Bob Sutton for his support and encouragement throughout this project. Thanks also go to Marshall Meyer and the ASQ reviewers for their insightful comments, and to Linda Pike for her stellar editing. Finally, I would like to thank the members of the California cattle industry who generously gave their time for this study. An earlier version of this paper won the Academy of Management, OMT division Louis R. Pondy award for the best paper based on a dissertation. 2 ABSTRACTThrough a series of three inductive and deductive studies, I describe how spokespersons from the California cattle industry constructed and effectively used verbal accounts to manage perceptions of organizational legitimacy following controversial events. Findings of Study 1 suggest that organizational accounts are constructed by linking two forms of accounts: acknowledgments or denials, with two contents of accounts: references to institutional or technical characteristics of the organization. Findings of Studies 2 and 3 suggest that, in protecting organizational legitimacy (1) acknowledgments are more effective than denials, (2) references to institutionalized characteristics are

Through two exploratory studies, we develop and test an introductory framework of "organizational disidentification." Our first study explores the concept of organizational disidentification through a qualitative investigation of cognitive relationships with the National Rifle Association (NRA). Findings suggest that organizational disidentification is a self-perception based on: (1) a cognitive separation between one's identity and the organization's identity, and (2) a negative relational categorization of oneself and the organization (e.g., categorizations such as "rivals" or "enemies"). Organizational disidentification appears to be motivated by individuals' desires to both affirm positive distinctiveness and avoid negative distinctiveness by distancing themselves from incongruent values and negative stereotypes attributed to an organization. Our findings also suggest that organizational disidentification can lead individuals to take action (either volunteer work or voicing their opinion) as a result of their perceived separation from the organization's identity. Results of our second study-a large-scale survey of public attitudes about the NRA-provide support for this framework.

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