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 develop enough acceptance to 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, which provide an example of emergent organizations requiring sanction from a larger umbrella organization, 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, rather than actual practices and (2) or...