Organizational sacralization and sacrilege

Organizations may commit deeds that are perceived by stakeholders and institutional actors as particularly heinous because they directly contradict sacred ideals, values, beliefs, and so on espoused by the organization. We refer to these deeds as sacrilege. To explain how sacrilege occurs, we develop a multi-level model of sacralization that argues that individuals, organizations, and institutions are motivated to construct a sense of the inviolable. Sacralization fosters strong normative control by generating a set of unique structural relationships among the individuals, organizations, and institutional context. We then use this model to explain how sacrilege undermines these structures and how organizations often attempt to recover from such violations.