Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Social evaluations are ubiquitous, affecting individuals, organizations, and industries. As societies evolve, so do human practices around the production and use of social evaluations. To further advance research it is important to understand the link among social evaluations and the practical benefits (or hazards) of evaluations for different actors. We therefore ask how are social evaluations used instrumentally across individuals, organizations, and industries, and what role do they play in society?
 
From positive evaluation such as legitimacy (Bitektine & Haack, 2015), reputation or status (Bitektine, 2011) to negative ones such as stigma (Roulet, 2020), scholars have documented how and why social evaluations benefit or hurt the actors being evaluated. It can be argued that the raison d'etre of social evaluations often lies in their implications for organizations and individuals, which in turn drive their instrumental use by various actors. Reputation, status and legitimacy are commonly presented as strong drivers of performance (George et al., 2016), which is why they are sought out. Similarly, stigma and disapproval are usually seen as something to be managed and contained (Lashley & Pollock, 2020).
 
However, the effects of social evaluations are often ambivalent, and recent work has flipped those assumptions around. Status can become a liability in the case of a scandal, making status something that can be used against its holder (Dewan & Jensen, 2020), stigma can become a way to strengthen internal identity (Tracey & Phillips, 2016), while legitimacy can inhibit learning (Zuzul & Edmondson, 2017). This suggests that the processes through which social evaluations work are more complex than often assumed, and more thorough exploration of these processes can yield important insights and identify previously overlooked practical implications that may be contingent on the social context and the audiences. These complexities raise new questions and opportunities in research with regards to the formation and instrumental use of social evaluations by different parties.
 
Furthermore, as the scope of social evaluation concepts expands, the instrumental utility of different types of evaluations requires more attention. Research on celebrity, authenticity, trustworthiness, and other types of social evaluations can generate important insights on how social evaluation emerge, how they interact with each other, as well as who and how uses them and for what purpose. Of particular interest in this respect is the exploration of the role of media and social media in formation or instrumental use of social judgments (Clemente & Illia, 2025), the use of fake news for social evaluations (Illia, Zyglidopoulos & Bantimaroudis, 2024; Mariconda et al., 2024), and how multiple social evaluators interact in the social evaluation process (Cattani et al., 2023).
 
We invite scholars to address social evaluations from diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches and welcome contributions from diverse disciplines, such as management, organization theory, communications, psychology, sociology, and economics. We encourage submissions that explore the role of different social evaluations in the context of enduring societal challenges, as well as in less-explored domains such as arts, sports, or social entrepreneurship. Papers can address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How do different types of social evaluations emerge? What is the role of different actors in this process?

• When do social evaluations matter, and when they don’t?

• What is the role of media, social media, fake news and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in an instrumental formation and use of social evaluations by different parties?

• What are the boundary conditions for silent social evaluations to be voiced?

• When do positive social evaluations become a liability and negative social evaluations become an asset?

• How do social evaluations constrain or enable other value generating processes?

• How can we mobilize new theories to understand the implications of social evaluations?

• How are different positive and negative social evaluations used and connected in their use?

• How do social evaluations spread across actors? How do they cross organizational and jurisdictional boundaries?

• How is social media used as a platform to revert changing social evaluations or to maintain the “status quo”?

• When are social evaluations fostered by actors to be later used for their own benefits?

• What are the boundary conditions for social evaluations to drive or reduce performance?

• How do social evaluators interact among each other and with the organization being evaluated in the social evaluation process?

References

• Bitektine, A. (2011): “Toward a theory of social judgments of organizations: The case of legitimacy, reputation, and status.” Academy of Management Review, 36 (1), 151–179.
• Bitektine, A., & Haack, P. (2015): “The ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’ of legitimacy: Toward a multilevel theory of the legitimacy process.” Academy of Management Review, 40 (1), 49–75.
• Cattani, G., Clemente, M., Durand, R., & Mai, K.M. (2024): “Who Controls the Controller? People Reaction to Social Control Agent’s Decisions about Organizational Misconduct.” Journal of Management Studies, 61 (3), 785–819.
• Clemente M., & Illia, L. (2025): “Media and Social Media in Social Evaluation.” In: A. Zavyalova & R. Younger (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Organisational Social Evaluations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, chapter 33 (forthcoming).
• Dewan, Y., & Jensen, M. (2020): “Catching the big fish: The role of scandals in making status a liability.” Academy of Management Journal, 63 (5), 1652–1678.
• George, G., Dahlander, L., Graffin, S.D., & Sim, S. (2016): “Reputation and status: Expanding the role of social evaluations in management research.” Academy of Management Journal, 59 (1), 1–13.
• Illia, L., Zyglidopoulos, S., & Bantimaroudis, P. (2024): “Staging the Lie: The Impact of Framing and Content on the Visibility of Fake Business News.” Business & Society, first published online on November 21, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503241298093.
• Lashley, K., & Pollock, T.G. (2020): “Waiting to inhale: Reducing stigma in the medical cannabis industry.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 65 (2), 434–482.
• Mariconda, S., Pizzetti, M., Etter, M., & Haack, P. (2024): Fooling Them, Not Me? How Fake News Affects Evaluators’ Reputation Judgments and Behavioral Intentions.” Business & Society, first published online on September 11, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503241271255.
• Roulet, T.J. (2020): The Power of Being Divisive. Understanding Negative Social Evaluations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Tracey, P., & Phillips, N. (2016): “Managing the consequences of organizational stigmatization: Identity work in a social enterprise.” Academy of Management Journal, 59 (3), 740–765.
• Zuzul, T., & Edmondson, A.C. (2017): “The advocacy trap: When legitimacy building inhibits organizational learning.” Academy of Management Discoveries, 3 (3), 302–321.
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