Shelter or Ghetto: Stigmatization and The Narrative Around The Creation of a LGBT Retirement Home

Organizations can emerge to help the stigmatized manage the negative consequences of the label they experience. We, however, know very little about how they can achieve such work. We argue those organizations have to navigate between addressing their members' needs while at the same time managing the expectations of their external audiences. External audiences may reject those organizations for affiliating themselves with the stigmatized. The stigmatized internal audiences can disagree with the way the organization portrays them. We took a narrative approach to understand how those organizations manage this tension in the wake of their emergence. To empirically explore this question, we conducted a longitudinal qualitative study of a project of retirement home dedicated to LGBT elders in France. We describe how this organization built an organizational narrative to balance the tension between its internal and external audiences. Our study makes three contributions. First, it reveals the cultural-political embeddedness of stigma when the stigmatized try to manage its consequences through mediating organizations. We also show this attempt may constitute a reflexive experience for the stigmatized. We finally show that organizational narratives constitute a critical transactional instrument to negotiate meaning between divergent expectations of audiences.