This paper examines how organizations create evangelists, members of key audiences who build a critical mass of support for new ways of doing things. We conduct a longitudinal, inductive study of Ontario's cool-climate wineries and members of six external audience groups who evangelized on behalf of their emerging winemaking practice. We found that wineries drew from three institutionalized vinicultural templates-"provenance," "hedonic," and "glory"-to craft rituals designed to convert these audience members. These rituals led to inspiring emotional experiences among audience members with receptive gourmand and regional identities, driving them to engage in evangelistic behaviors. While a growing body of work on evangelists has emphasized their individual characteristics, the role of emotions in driving their activities, as well as how they advocate for organizations, our study demonstrates how evangelism can be built through ritualized interactions with organizations. Specifically, we reveal how organizations develop rituals that translate emerging practices into inspiring emotional experiences for particular members of audiences. This suggests that rituals can be used not only to incite dedication within organizational boundaries, but to inspire members of external audiences to act as social conduits through which emerging practices spread.
We propose that stigma and legitimacy are distinct constructs. Drawing from extant research, empirical observations, and the theoretical assumptions of both constructs we assert that, in spite of increasing efforts to equate stigma as illegitimacy, the opposite of legitimacy, that it is not. Specifically, we argue that organizations and their actors can be both stigmatized and legitimate at the same time. With this recognized, we propose a stigma-focused research agenda, separate from-and untainted by-legitimacy. Further, we propose an agenda that broadens conceptualizations of audiences and their dynamics, addresses how normal "deviants" take action in the face of stigma, and reconceptualises how audiences and the stigmatized interact.
This paper theorizes that conflict management strategies influence radical settlements in institutional fields. Radical settlements are truces to conflict reached between field constituents that significantly change constituents’ relations and their institutional context. We develop theory on the concept of radical settlements by introducing a typology of conflict management strategies that predicts variance in the likelihood of a radical settlement in institutional fields. We ground this typology within a framework of two key antecedents – ideological salience and field polarization – proposed to influence conflict management strategies. Our paper provides new insights to the literature on conflict and institutional change by shedding new light on the counter-intuitive phenomenon of conflict settlement or cessation as a catalyst for change within institutional fields.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.