Organization and Management Theory OMT

Did you hear on that podcast that Bill Gates puts microchips in vaccines? Or read in that blog that Elon Musk programs Teslas to run over squirrels? And wow – check out this video on YouTube that looks like a jacked-up Jeff Bezos kicking an Amazon delivery driver and stealing twenty bucks from him!  

Fake news is fabricated information intended to tell a false story about an object or event (Tandoc, Lim and Ling, 2018). We live in an era in which fake news and "alternative facts" challenge our understanding of people, events, and organizations. "Deep fake" technology can distort and even upend reality. Rumors and false information are not novel phenomena, but their scope and sophistication are new, and are only increasing. The profusion of social media, perfection of technology, and profound changes in the management philosophies of modern news outlets have made fake news omnipresent and often indistinguishable from reality.  

With almost no barriers to its creation and dissemination, fake news has diffused massively and is increasingly influencing public discourse about private enterprise (Roulet, 2020). How do stakeholders process all of this fake news about companies? How does it affect corporate governance? What are its overall consequences for both business and society?  

In this special issue, we seek to develop scholarly insights into how social evaluations of organizations form, how they are maintained, how they change, and how this affects the relationship between business and society when the information that underpins these evaluations cannot be trusted. Social evaluations refer to the opinions, attitudes, and perceptions of an organizations' stakeholders, and include celebrity, image, reputation, legitimacy, status, and stigma. Social evaluations are a critical mechanism of social control over business (Scott, 1995). Stakeholders exert social control by rewarding and punishing firms based upon evaluations of their behaviors; firms respond by adjusting their behaviors to conform to shared social norms (Barnett, 2018). For instance, NGOs publicly expressing their disapproval of plastic have driven firms to convert to plastic-free practices (Castello and Lopez-Berzosa, 2021). Firms' compliance with stakeholder demands to adapt to changing social norms can be a source of competitive advantage (Rindova and Martins, 2012; Pfarrer, Pollock and Rindova, 2010; Podolny, 2005; Roberts and Dowling, 2002).