Stigmas, Work and Organizations

The rate of obesity has been growing around the world and, along with it, the obesity stigma. Obesity bias is based on perceptions that the condition is in a person’s control and is a character flaw for which one is responsible. These negative perceptions drive weight discrimination in the workplace that exists at every level from CEOs to HR professionals to coworkers and covers hiring, assignment, and advancement decisions. The workplace weight bias creates damaging impacts for obese and overweight persons, organizations, and society. This chapter examines the role of the obesity stigma in the workplace, its pervasiveness, false assumptions that drive it, and the possible ways of reducing it.

Many people with chronic illness participate in the workforce and will continue to do so. Thus, they must cope with their illness symptoms and other peoples’ reactions to their illness in the workplace. In recent years, research on the effects of chronic illness in the workplace has highlighted effects such as stress and burnout (McGonagle et al., Stress and Health, 30, 310–321, 2014), and its effects on daily work interactions (Vickers, Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 15(2), 85–98, 2003) and career progression (Beatty, Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 24, 91–110, 2012). Findings underscore that having a chronic illness influences not only workplace performance but also social interactions through stereotyping and stigmatization. This chapter will focus on the processes and outcomes of a specific category of stigma—chronic illness stigma—with the aim of discussing the unique issues experienced by this population.

In the United States, individuals with disabilities make up almost one-fifth of the American population, but they are unemployed at a rate that is twice that of people without disabilities (Erickson et al., Disability statistics from the 2014 American Community Survey (ACS). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Yang Tan Institute (YTI), 2016). There are multiple interacting factors that result in significant barriers to employment and many of them are related to disability stigma and resulting disparate behavior. This chapter will examine the complexity of disability stigma in employment by exploring it from the micro (individual), mesa (employers), and meta (society) levels. It is at the intersection of these levels where strategies can lead to a reduction of barriers in organizational access and opportunity for individuals with disabilities.

Scholars in organizational psychology have found that organizational factors (such as policies, practices, norms, and climate) influence the psychological process of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees, yet it is unclear how community characteristics beyond the organizational context affect the psychological experiences of LGBT employees. In this chapter, we explore the extent to which a local community’s legal, social-normative, and cultural-cognitive features exert great influence on an organization’s stance on its LGBT policies, which in turn affect its employees’ perception of discrimination based on sexual orientation. The regulative, social-normative, and cultural-cognitive processes in a community are also influenced by individuals, groups, and organizations, particularly in relation to stigma and stigmatization toward LGBT individuals residing in the community, and in relation to the degree to which LGBT-related policies and practices are adopted within and across organizations in a community. We also offer directions for future research.

Morally dirty work refers to organization, occupation or employment tasks regarded as sinful, dubious, deceptive, intrusive or confrontational. For those who perform such work (dirty workers), moral taint serves as a stain on the individual’s integrity, a defect of character that may stick even after the individual stops performing the work. Often such work can be simultaneously viewed in positive and negative terms, thus performed by individuals who, we suggest, can paradoxically be considered both saints and sinners. In this chapter, we explain what we understand by moral taint and the implications at the individual, group and organization levels. We discuss what we provocatively refer to as the most obvious sinners (e.g., casino workers, HIV/AIDS/addiction caregivers, genetic termination nurses, border patrol agents), the sometimes sinners (e.g., correctional officers, truckers, private detectives), and new and surprising sinners (e.g., bankers, nursing as pornography, secretaries). We conclude with areas for future research.

Drawing on two studies of those involved in physically tainted jobs, this chapter seeks to explore what constraints might compel or hinder the application of particular discursive ideologies and strategies in battling stigma attached to these jobs. The findings demonstrate how workers count on labour market participation as a way of preserving their worth. Participants also possess a strong sense of the appropriateness of particular types of work, a sense consistent with traditional norms of masculinity. However, edifying ideologies that workers commonly draw on lose their value as a result of changing labour market conditions (significantly less demand for physical labour and a preference for “clean” white collar work) and malformed understandings of what is useful (when the notion of utility shifts from “being beneficial to communities” to “providing the best value for tax payers’ money”).

Working with emotion—performing emotion as part of your job, interacting with emotional people, managing the emotions of others, or dealing with issues that arouse emotion—is a challenge for many workers every day. However, we rarely actually talk about emotion in the every-day interactions at our jobs. Similarly, scholarly research has often marginalized, silenced, or simply overlooked the important role emotion plays in our organizational lives. When it is discussed, emotion is often characterized as disruptive or out of place, particularly in the workplace. In this chapter, I discuss the challenges of negotiating emotion at work when that emotion is stigmatized. Utilizing short stories that illustrate how emotionally stigmatized workers respond to emotional stigma, this chapter probes the concept of emotional stigma and how it relates to theoretical frameworks of dirty work and emotional labor. Emotional taint helps us understand the complex ways in which power is intricately involved in how emotional stigma is constructed, performed, and resisted.

Despite significant policy efforts to widen participation, non-traditional students continue to be under-represented in high status university degrees such as medicine. Although this issue is both global and intransigent, relatively little is known about the journeys of non-traditional students who do succeed in gaining access to high status degrees and their associated professions. Theirs is a unique story of extreme social mobility, where students move from humble family of origin into university and the elite organisational contexts of medical education and associated clinical settings. This chapter draws on a qualitative study of first-in-family medical students to explore their experience of extreme social mobility and the overt and subtle forms of stigma they face. Using Goffman’s notion of discreditable identity, the chapter provides a fine grained account of how students negotiate and resist stigma to tactically incorporate aspects of their working-class or cultural selves into emerging professional identities.

The work on stigmatization and the individual in the work environment started with Goffman’s treatise in 1963 as several of his examples encompassed the work environment. However, the application of stigma theory to both the group level and the organizational level stigma research has not reached the same level of interest from management/business academics as the individual level. Organizational stigma did not appear as a research field until the late 1980s, and it was not until 2005 that the term organizational stigma appeared. This chapter will trace those early forays into the application of stigma theory to the organizational environment to the current research on organizational stigma. Upon completion of the review of the development, I will delve into the shortcomings of the current research and theoretical development and suggest directions for future research.

Using a Chinese MNC’s expansion into Australia we assess whether or not organizational stigmas (tribal or conduct) are attached by external stakeholders. We find a weak tribal stigma exists based on country of origin (China). However, a strong conduct stigma is attached to the industry due to environmental concerns. Although participants perceive an illegitimate practice, a high level of controllability and a distinct possibility of danger to the community, they still support the development because of the economic benefits. Thus, the concept of ‘opportunity costs’ plays an important role in mediating the effect of organizational stigmatization.

The previous chapters highlight the influence of stigmas in the workplace at three different levels—mirco/individual, meso/group-occupational, and macro/organizational. The chapters provide background, analysis, and a deeper holistic understanding of the application of stigma theory to the organizational environment. The authors illustrate in their analyses the complexity of stigmas. As we reflected on the contributions in this book, four themes resonated throughout the book—(1) no one reason for stigma or solution to it; (2) emotions, embodiment, and the material nature of stigmas; (3) transferability and removability of stigma; and (4) context-specific nature of stigmas. From each of these areas, unanswered questions remain, which in turn provide avenues for new research as it relates to stigma, work, and organizations. In this chapter we discuss each of these areas and hope that you are struck by something that triggers an interest for future pursuit.