How Organizations Move from Stigma to Legitimacy: The Case of Cook’s Travel Agency in Victorian Britain

Based on an in-depth historical study of how Thomas Cook’s travel agency moved from stigmatization to legitimacy among the elite of Victorian Britain, we develop a model of organizational destigmatization. We find that audiences stigmatize an organization because they fear that it threatens a particular moral order, which leads them to mount sustained attacks designed to weaken or eradicate the organization. Our model suggests that an...