The Persistence of a Stigmatized Practice: A Study of Competitive Intelligence

摘要: Studies on the diffusion of practices provide valuable insights into how organizations adopt, adapt, sustain and abandon over time. However, few studies focus stigmatized diffuse persist, even when they risk tainting adopters. To address this issue understand firms manage practices, we study US associated with practice competitive intelligence (CI) between 1985 2012. CI includes legitimate information gathering that are sometimes also infringements espionage. Our findings suggest became highly diffused persisted despite stigmatizing its We identified three factors to explain CI’s persistence: (1) keeping it opaque avoid negative effects stigmatization, (2) ‘constructing’ usefulness justify ongoing use by leveraging accepted beliefs invoking fear unilateral abandonment (3) adapting developing multiple versions increase zone acceptability. These contribute persistence allowing dilute potential stigma from practice. contribution lies in explaining adoption, a whose benefits cannot be overtly acknowledged or made public.