Constructing Organizational Legitimacy Despite Core-Stigma: Discursive Practices of Nevada's Legal Brothels

• In Event: B.E.S.T.: The Dark Side of Organizations--Paranoia/Paradox, Risk/Disaster, Invisibility, Unemployment, Ostracizing and Beyond...

Abstract

This study of Nevada’s legal brothels treats organizational legitimacy as a discursive problem for core-stigmatized organizations. Although brothels need to construct a legitimate corporate reputation in order to survive as a business, laws meant to contain their core-stigma threaten their ability to build or maintain widespread organizational legitimacy. Brothels address this legitimacy problem by adopting deviance management strategies in order to build moral, cognitive, and market legitimacy. However, the “appropriate” employment of these strategies is complicated by the realization that brothel workers experience a dialectical tension between normative dictates to “lay low in the sagebrush” and to increase transparency and visibility.

Authors

• Anna Wiederhold Wolfe, University of Nevada, Reno

• Sarah Jane Blithe, U of Nevada, Reno