Evaluating Organizations in an Age of Absurdity: How Fake News Disrupts the Relationship Between Business and Society

Abstract

Fake news—false or misleading information presented as news—now abounds. As information about firms becomes decreasingly credible, can stakeholders make effective use of their influence to drive firms to engage in socially responsible behaviors? We assembled this special issue to explore the extent to which the social evaluations that underpin stakeholder cognition and action have been compromised and to assess how this affects firm behavior in this era of fake news. The five articles comprising this issue elucidate the strategies used to spread fake news and show how it influences stakeholders. They find that emotionality proves effective in spreading and countering fake news. However, even when fake news is successfully countered, a negative residue remains. Fake news is particularly insidious because even when stakeholders know it to be false, they act in ways consonant with it being true. Overall, these articles provide evidence that fake news alters the ways in which stakeholders use social evaluations and harms the ability to use social control to bring business and society into alignment. However, much remains to be done to understand the complicated relationship between business and society in a compromised information environment.