Abstract:
Extant scholarship on social evaluations, such as organizational reputation, legitimacy, and status, assumes an agreement among evaluators, which sidesteps the possibility of divergence and polarization of judgments at collective level. Over recent years, however, we have increasingly observed the polarization of judgments with regard to organizations. In this conceptual article, I outline how the prevailing assumption of collective agreement manifests in empirical studies and conceptual models that propose aggregation of individual judgments into monolithic collective social evaluations. Subsequently, I start to question these assumptions by highlighting judgment heterogeneity and divergence at individual and collective level, as well as contextual changes that facilitate divergence and polarization of social evaluations, such as the erosion of traditional judgment authorities and the emergence of alternative evaluation networks. In the second part of the article, I will start to unpack how social judgments become polarized through various affective, cognitive, and communicative processes.

Michael Etter, PhD, is reader at King’s College London and associate professor at Copenhagen Business School. He has a PhD in organization studies and cultural theories from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. He is interested in the construction of social evaluation of new and established firms, such as organizational reputation and legitimacy, in the new media landscape, which is shaped by new information and communication technologies (ICT). He looks at strategies, which new and established firms use to establish favourable social judgments in the digital economy. His work has appeared in academic journals, such as Academy of Management Annals, Academy Management Review, Business & Society, Journal of Management Studies, and International Journal of Strategic Communication. He has received multiple awards for his research and teaching excellence, as well as several research grants from prestigious funding institutions, such as the British Academy and the European Commission.