1989: “Institutions in Crisis!”: What it Means and How Social Evaluation Scholars Can Address It (12380)

We are currently facing numerous societal crises, such as the institutional trust crisis. Social evaluation scholars – who study the production, maintenance, and repair of key social evaluation concepts such as legitimacy, reputation, trust, status, celebrity, and stigma – are, in principle, uniquely positioned to address these crises. However, their expertise seems to be sought less often than that of economists and public policy scholars. We suggest that this lack of inclusion is due to a lack of conceptual clarity in social evaluation research. The confounding of key concepts leads to a fragmentation of research, inconsistencies in the definition and measurements of concepts, and ultimately limits the guidance that social evaluation scholars provide to policymakers and practitioners. Our goal in this symposium is, therefore, to bring together social evaluation scholars and discuss how we can work together to contribute more effectively to addressing societal crises, such as the current institutional trust crisis. Four distinguished social evaluation scholars will introduce a key concept in the social evaluation literature (i.e., trust, stigma, authenticity, legitimacy, and reputation) and reflect on its strengths and limitations in explaining societal crises such as the institutional trust crisis. We then use these introductions to facilitate a discussion on how social evaluation scholars can improve conceptual clarity and build bridges between the concepts. In doing so, we aim not only to develop a future research agenda for social evaluation scholars, but also to create a starting point for a discussion forum for impactful social evaluation research.