Whips, Chains and Books on Campus: How Organizations Legitimate Their Stigmatized Practices

This paper explores how emergent organizations with core stigma and taboo practices work to gain widespread acceptance, extending work on organizational legitimacy and highlighting the growing number of purpose-driven organizations. We focus on emergent organizations because little is known about how they become established in the first place. We examine the intersection of core stigma and strategies in emergent, purpose-driven organizations through the provocative case of official university student organizations focused on kink and kinky sexuality. From examination of these organizations’ historical emergence and university-sanctioned constitutions, we posit that (1) due process and impersonal evaluation processes enable recognition of taboo topics, particularly if official sanction is focused on organizational structure and roles and (2) organizations leverage credible social discourses, such as individual rights, to emphasize issues both pertinent to sanctioning organizations and mainstream throughout society. This research is timely given the explosion of emergent organizations today with socially taboo purposes