Professional credibility under attack: Responses to negative social evaluations in newly contested professions
研究了银行专业人士在政府调查中面对个人批评时，如何通过去个人化和个人化两个过程重新协商专业可信度，对理解职业声誉修复有启示。
How do professionals attempt to restore their credibility when it has been tarnished by crises or scandals? To address this issue, we examined how banking professionals who testified during a government inquiry into the 2008 banking crisis in Ireland responded when confronted with negative social evaluations (NSEs) evidenced by personal criticism of their judgment, competence, or morality. We find that professional credibility is renegotiated through two processes: depersonalization and personalization. Testifiers distanced themselves from criticism through a depersonalization process by which they reoriented the unfolding narrative toward broader collectives such as their own profession, adjacent professions, and the macroeconomic environment. They also engaged in a personalization process by which they showcased individual efforts to improve their work processes and outcomes to bolster their professional credibility. Our work theoretically elaborates the view of NSEs as being socially constructed and brings the role of professional credibility of individuals to the fore of the NSE literature. In doing so, it offers a broader perspective on the repertoire of criticisms and responses associated with NSEs than that documented by prior studies, and it emphasizes how professionals seek to reassert their credibility. We also present a less deterministic view of public inquiries.