FROM PREDATOR TO PREY: THE EDIFICATION OF STIGMA MANAGEMENT IN THE SMALL-DOLLAR LOAN INDUSTRY

In this dissertation, I focus on how entrepreneurs in a stigmatized industry – the Small-Dollar, or “Payday” Loan industry – manage industry stigma and evaluate the extent to which they employ strategies to mitigate this stigma. This dissertation is an ethnographic, participatory observation study, where I engage with lenders as a customer, borrowing and paying back loans from different small-dollar establishments. I find that, in response to being subject to multiple elements of stigma, industry representatives, entrepreneurs, and employees used a variety of strategies, in part, based on the policies initiated against their industry that resulted in different strategies employed to reduce industry stigma. My findings also focus attention on the cross-level nature of stigma management in organizational research, and its enactment between organizations and its effects on a key audience, customers, who also experience the industry’s stigma. The combination of these findings expands theoretical understanding of entrepreneurship in highly contested and uncertain domains, by integrating research from the stigma literature to offer a nuanced perspective of the process and outcomes of industry stigma.