When the Story Survives the Scandal: Understanding Social Media Audiences’ Post-Scandal Support for Deceptive Entrepreneurs
Type: article
Abstract: Entrepreneurial scandals create public evidence that undermines the validity of prior claims, yet online audiences often continue to accept or defend the entrepreneur and their narrative. We examine why legitimacy persists, fragments, or recovers following such a breakdown of validity. Using more than 2.6 million Reddit posts concerning 36 scandalized digital entrepreneurship gurus, we combine event-time analysis of expressed propriety, community validity, and community consensus with structural topic modeling and qualitative process analysis. Our preliminary findings identify four post-scandal trajectories and suggest distinct audience-side mechanisms underlying each. We contribute to social evaluations research by showing how legitimacy dimensions can decouple after public disconfirmation, to cultural entrepreneurship by theorizing audience (dis)enchantment and narrative regeneration as processes through which online communities sustain or reconstruct entrepreneurial legitimacy after scandal, and to information systems research by explaining how networked audiences collectively reinterpret disconfirming evidence and sustain divergent social judgments after validity breakdowns.
Authors: Meurer, Madeleine, Honecker, Felix
Institutions: Erasmus University Rotterdam, University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222988668