Keeping Up With the Times? Rethinking Social Evaluations Research Under Contemporary Technological and Sociopolitical Forces

The context within which social evaluations form has been fundamentally altered by contemporary forces, such as digital technologies, polarization, activism, politicization of business, and geopolitical tensions. While research on social evaluations has generated rich insights into the formation and development of constructs, such as legitimacy, status, reputation, stigma, trust, and celebrity, much of this work has been developed under the assumptions of relative stability, coherent audiences, and well‐defined intermediary roles. These assumptions are increasingly challenged in this changing context, requiring us to rethink the formation and management of social evaluations. The articles in this special issue focus on these changes. Building on these contributions, this introductory article develops a research agenda across seven interconnected areas: the stability and fragility of social evaluations, audience fragmentation and convergence, the reshaping of the intermediary landscape, construct interrelationships, range and extension of constructs, the measurement of social evaluations, and their underlying foundations. We discuss how these transformations affect not only organizations and evaluative processes, but also the societal impact of social evaluations. Overall, this editorial provides a framework to guide future research in a field undergoing profound transition.