UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Professor Thomas Roulet, Cambridge University,to host a research seminar discussing ‘Shelter or Ghetto? Polyphonic Narrative as Stigma Management in the Creation of an LGBT Retirement Home’.

 

Stigmatized organizations have to manage a polyphony of conflicting voices – those emanating from both sympathetic and stigmatizing audiences. Narratives emerge as a crucial tool to navigate these tensions, providing a platform to accommodate different voices flexibly and dynamically. In this study, we explore how this polyphony can be orchestrated to manage stigma. We look at a project to develop the first retirement home dedicated to the LGBT community in France in a four-year, longitudinal, qualitative, in-depth case study. Through our analysis, we observed how the stigmatizing voices were progressively brought into the stigmatized organization’s narrative. Our findings show how stigmatized organizations can craft a harmonious polyphonic narrative by first playing on ambiguity to satisfy conflicting audiences’ voices, and subsequently translating these voices from one audience to another. We contribute to the organizational stigma literature by showing how multiple stigmatizing audiences can be co-opted to maintain and reinforce support from audiences, challenging the conventional understanding of organizational stigmatization as a linear and unidirectional process. Furthermore, our case adds important research on organizational narratives by highlighting how apparently contradictory voices can be reconciled into one effective polyphonic narrative.