ON EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL JUDGMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Alex Bitektine

JMSB - Concordia University

room T013

While some judgments may arise from individual impressions, intuitions, or analytical assessments, others are primarily shaped by collective beliefs. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of understanding how social evaluations develop and change, this question has received surprisingly little attention. 

We draw on research on multiple kinds of social evaluations (legitimacy, reputation, status, authenticity, trustworthiness, stigma, etc.) to identify three developmental stages of judgment maturity, which reflect increasing levels of social integration and stability in how judgments are collectively held. We describe the mechanisms that drive judgment evolution within a single judgment type—for example, when legitimacy evolves from individual’s legitimacy judgment (propriety) to collectively held legitimacy judgment (validity). 

We then shift our focus to judgment evolution pathways that extend across different types of social evaluations, explaining how one type of judgment (e.g., reputation) can give rise to others, such as status, trustworthiness, or legitimacy. Recent literature suggests that different types of judgments can interact in complex ways: they may influence each other through heuristic inference (Bitektine et al., Forthcoming), shift between levels (Bitektine & Haack, 2015; Tost, 2011), align in terms of positive or negative valence (Lange et al., 2025), and even become taken-for-granted over time (Berger et al., 1998; Meyerson et al., 1996; Suchman, 1995; Tost, 2011). These insights point to the possibility of multiple evolutionary paths for how a specific judgment may form. 

Understanding why and how judgments evolve is crucial for explaining how individuals’ opinions become ‘intangible assets’ that are then ‘owned’ and ‘used’ by organizations (Pfarrer et al., 2010; Piazza & Castellucci, 2014; Pollock et al., 2019; Rao, 1994).