Conquering the Divide? The Role of Political Polarization in the Destigmatization of a U.S. Medical Marijuana Platform Market

A documented recent rise in the polarization of American legislative politics underscores the question of how increasing political polarization affects organizations and industries. Yet, organizational scholars have not directed significant attention to the impact of polarization. In this paper, we demonstrate that political polarization may play an important role in organizational dynamics by revealing that polarization may expedite the destigmatization of legal yet historically stigmatized industries. To this end, we develop a theory explaining how political polarization normalizes counter-normative behavior and encourages customers to become open about their engagement with stigmatized products and organizations—a key step toward industry destigmatization. We further argue that this polarization impact may vary across regional markets because of differences in local legitimation processes that can either amplify (normative legitimacy) or attenuate (regulatory legitimacy) the effect of polarization on consumer engagement with a stigmatized industry. We find empirical evidence for our theorizing in analyses of all U.S. dispensaries of medical marijuana that existed on the online platform Weedmaps.com from its beginning in 2008 to 2014. Ultimately, this paper suggests that political polarization can significantly influence organizations and industries and thus warrants more systematic investigation and attention from organizational scholars, particularly in stigmatized industries.