Managing image in a core-stigmatized organization: Concealment and revelation in Nevada's legal...

Running head: MANAGING IMAGE IN A CORE-STIGMATIZED ORGANIZATION

Managing Image in a Core-Stigmatized Organization:

Concealment and Revelation in Nevada’s Legal Brothels

(pre-print version)

Anna Wiederhold Wolfe, Ph.D. (corresponding author)

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies

University of Nevada, Reno

Mail Stop 0229, Reno, NV 89557

(775)784-1416, [email protected]

Sarah Jane Blithe, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies

University of Nevada, Reno

Mail Stop 0229, Reno, NV 89557

(775)784-6826, [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Abstract

This study examines the nature of the revelation-concealment dialectic faced by Nevada’s legal

brothels as these organizations work to strategically build visibility despite external pressures to

keep them hidden and internal desires to protect the privacy of certain organizational

stakeholders. Additionally, in instances of organizational visibility, we examine brothels’

strategies for managing core-stigma while attempting to project a socially-acceptable public

image. Brothels address this revelation-concealment dialectic by adopting stigma-management

strategies of distancing themselves from identities they perceive as socially undesirable and

aligning themselves with non-stigmatized industry practices. At the same time, the brothels

construct selectively-permeable organizational boundaries through the invitation of controlled

outsider boundary-crossings and through the promotion of their own community-engagement

efforts. These results extend research on hidden organizations to consider the particular image-

management challenges faced by shadowed organizations.

Keywords:

organizational visibility, sex work, stigma, dialectical theory, privacy boundary management

Word Count: 9,887

MANAGING IMAGE IN A CORE-STIGMATIZED ORGANIZATION 1

Organizations are often accountable to multiple social audiences with disparate values,

conflicting ideologies, and irreconcilable belief systems. As such, it is likely that “perhaps all

organizations are stigmatized by some social audiences at one time or another” (Hudson, 2008,

p. 254). However, for some organizations, the management of stigma is not temporary, event-

based, or narrowly limited to interactions with some fringe audience with particularly strict

moral codes. Rather, for core-stigmatized organizations, managing some form of “spoiled

image” (Goffman, 1963) is part of the daily operating procedures because of the very nature of

the work: “Core-stigma is the result of a negative social evaluation by some audience(s) of an

organization because of some core organizational attribute, such as core routines, core outputs,

and/or core customers” (Hudson, 2008, p. 252). Core-stigma drives many legal organizations to

adopt strategic responses, such as hiding, in order to manage their collective organizational

image and to protect the identities of affiliated persons from the taint of association.

Stigmatized organizations are one type of potentially hidden organization (Scott, 2013).

Our contribution to this special issue on hidden organizations is a study of Nevada’s legal

brothels. Due to their experiences of “spoiled image” these organizations tend to be hidden to a

certain degree to avoid scrutiny from hostile audiences (Hudson, 2008), to protect customers and

suppliers from transferred stigma (Hudson & Okhuysen, 2009), and to adhere to zoning laws and

statutes that relegate them to places where interaction with most stakeholder groups will be

limited in quantity and quality (Devers, Dewett, Mishina, & Belsito, 2009). Although these

brothels vary in their level of transparency or darkness, they generally operate as “mildly

shadowed organizations,” which are those entities where “the organization itself is relatively

recognized. However…members are generally silent about their belonging and the relevant

audience remains a rather local/limited one” (Scott, 2013, p. 162). As we will discuss in this


article, the brothels have certain incentives to build organizational visibility; however, they also

encounter certain barriers in this endeavor due to external pressures to keep them hidden and

internal desires to protect the privacy of key stakeholders.

We examine the nature of this revelation-concealment dialectic faced by Nevada’s legal

brothels, as well as organizational strategies for managing core-stigma while constructing a

public image. The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of these revelation-

concealment tensions for the image-management practices of shadowed organizations. To that

end, we briefly define organizational stigma before introducing dialectical theory and discussing

the dialectal tensions out of which the brothels’ organizational practices have historically

emerged.

Defining Organizational Stigma

Simply put, organizational stigma refers to “a collective stakeholder group-specific

perception that an organization possesses a fundamental, deep-seated flaw that de-individuates

and discredits the organization” (Devers et al., 2009, p. 155). As such, this negative social

evaluation categorizes an organization as “emblematic of the negatively evaluated category to

which it is linked and, thus, caricatured as an embodiment of values that explicitly conflict with

those of the stakeholder group” (Devers et al., 2009, p. 157). In this way, stigmatizing

stakeholder groups tend to conflate individual stigmatized organizations with all other

organizations carrying that stigma.

An important distinction in organizational stigma research is made by Hudson (2008),

who argues that a meaningful difference exists between those organizations that experience what

he calls “event-stigma” versus “core-stigma.” When organizations’ images are tarnished by

anomalous, episodic acts of misconduct, error, accident, or failure, they experience event-stigma.


In contrast, those organizations regularly experiencing social condemnation for the very nature

of their services, clientele, or products-- men’s bathhouses and pornographers (Hudson &

Okhuysen, 2009; Rich, 2001), and gambling and tobacco companies (Galvin, Ventresca, &

Hudson, 2005)--experience core-stigma.

Previous studies have suggested that the presence of stigma is often managed with

isolation, hiding, or concealment strategies (Hudson, 2008; Hudson & Okhuysen, 2009, Scott,

2013). A central argument of this paper is that for shadowed organizations, these hiding

strategies are insufficient as the only approach to managing a tainted image. Rather, this study

highlights how the presence of core stigma complicates organizational efforts to manage this

dialectic of revelation-concealment.

Dialectical Contradictions and Revelation-Concealment Tensions

Dialetical theory is perhaps best described as a “family of theories rather than a single,

unitary theory” (Baxter & Erbert, 1999, p. 548). Despite the range of perspectives encompassed

by this family of theories, dialectical theorists share in common a belief in the centrality of

contradiction in relationships. Contradictions refer to the “dynamic interplay and articulation

together of opposites (e.g., control and resistance)” which leads scholars to “explore the

possibilities that exist in keeping the opposites in tension and play” (Mumby, 2005, p. 22).

Although theorizing about dialectical tensions was developed by Baxter and Montgomery (2006)

to explain contradictory and mutually desired goals or needs in interpersonal relations, this

theory has been adapted to explain organizational tensions as well (e.g., Erhardt & Gibbs, 2014;

Gordon, 2011).

For the purpose of this paper, we limit our focus to the dialectic of revelation-

concealment, a subset of Expression-Privacy, which refers to “informational candor versus


informational discretion” (Baxter & Erbert, 1999, p. 549). Shadowed organizations like

Nevada’s legal brothels experience potentially contradictory desires to both increase

organizational visibility and protect the privacy of affiliated members, as the organizations tend

to be relatively recognized but affiliated members are generally silent about their belonging

(Scott, 2013). These simultaneous desires for visibility and privacy are rooted in the brothels’

persistent problem of tainted image.

As stigmatized organizations, brothels’ construed external image--or the perception

organizational members have of how outsiders perceive the organization (Dutton & Dukerich,

1991)--often does not match the organizational identity--insiders’ deeply held sense of that

which is central, distinctive, and enduring about the organization (Albert & Whetten, 1985). As

such, brothels and other shadowed organizations are faced with what Scott (2013) identified as a

“reputation problem: they must create enough of a favorable reputation to attract needed

resources (money, members, clients, etc.), but they have to do so without disclosing core

information” that could reveal, in the case of many shadowed organizations, affiliated members

(p. 208). Brothels cannot entirely control what stakeholders actually think of the organization,

but they can promote certain images that may be influential. This image work is complicated,

however, due to many clients’ and workers’ desires to keep their affiliations with the brothels

secret.

The revelation-concealment dialectic, as the external manifestation of this expression-

privacy tension, refers to the challenges associated with attempts to meet opposing needs to both

reveal and conceal information about these relationships in organizational networks. In her work

on privacy boundary management, Petronio (2002) has suggested that managing this revelation-

concealment dialectic when stigmatizing information is shared among a collectivity requires


coordination regarding how much others inside and outside of the organization may know and

who owns the rights to disclose information. When individuals disclose potentially-stigmatizing

information, they become vulnerable to possible damage to their images and identities (Hecht &

Faulkner, 2000). When core-stigmatized organizations engage in these practices, they generally

accept the risks associated with heightened visibility for themselves but are faced with the

simultaneous challenge of not disclosing information and affiliations that constituent members

would prefer remain hidden. This theoretical framework helps us to consider the tensions out of

which shadowed organizational practices have developed.

Stigma Management and Organizational (In)Visibility

The literature on hidden organizations includes many core-stigmatized organizations

because, often, stigmatized organizations seek refuge from negativity in the shadowy edges of

society. Indeed, the primary way that core-stigmatized organizations have responded to the

challenge of managing their tarnished image is to adopt concealing strategies. Four of the five

strategies Hudson (2008) offers for responding to core-stigma fall into this category. First,

specialist strategies refer to organizations’ decisions to limit operation to one or very few

domains in order to limit the likelihood of that stigma contaminating other enterprises. Second,

core-stigmatized organizations adopt hiding strategies (e.g., remote locations, limited

signage/advertising) to avoid scrutiny from hostile audiences and minimize potential negative

consequences of stigma by limiting awareness of their existence. A third strategy is limiting

organizational size to avoid drawing attention. Relatedly, the fourth strategy consists of shielding

network partners from transferred stigma by disguising association between customers and

partners or selecting already stigmatized network partners. All of these strategies are based on

the assumption that “the greater the exposure of the stigmatized organization(s), the greater the


awareness of stigmatizing audiences and the greater the stigma expressed by the audiences and

experienced by the organization” (Hudson, 2008, p. 258).

As Nevada’s legal brothels attempt to protect the privacy of clients and workers while

increasing organizational visibility, they provide a key case for examining image-management

practices of shadowed organizations. These “backstreet businesses” (Scott, 2013) have a legal

right to exist in most of Nevada’s counties and could benefit in a number of ways by increasing

their organizational visibility; however, they remain marginalized, hidden outside of most city

limits. In order to understand the development of this dialectical tension in the specific context of

Nevada’s legal brothels, it is important to first understand the history of sex work in the only

U.S. state to legalize the industry.

A Brief History of Nevada’s Legal Brothels

The state of Nevada’s history, including the history of its legal brothels, is closely linked

with its mineral riches hidden beneath the ground’s surface. The 1859 discovery of large deposits

of silver in Virginia City attracted widespread attention as the Nevada territory quickly became

one of the wealthiest regions in the West (Angel, 1881). This mineral discovery, called the

Comstock Lode, attracted miners from across the country to settle in the Washoe Valley. Men

outnumbered women three to one in these mining communities and many of them were willing

to pay for the comforts of a warm bed, a bath, and female companionship (Snadowsky, 2005). In

this way, the brothel boardinghouses developed in a symbiotic relationship with the community

through the growth of the mining industry.

Even in these early days, when no laws existed regarding prostitution, many residents of

the mining towns experienced the same conflict between moral concerns and economic benefits

still common among present-day Nevadans: “General opinion held that the brothels were


tolerable, as long as they kept a low profile. What seemed to worry citizens were the brothels

that became too well known, which usually happened when owners refused to remain discreet”

(Albert, 2001, pp. 186-187). Despite these moral concerns, brothels continued to exist, in large

part, due to their economic contribution to the region. Taxes on prostitution supported early

frontier school systems and provided towns with a steady tax base despite the transient nature of

most of their residents (Rutter, 2005).

Although brothels have a long tenure in Nevada, for most of their history they existed due

to the absence of state law prohibiting it rather than the affirmative legalization of the industry.

The state laws that do exist contribute to the hidden nature of legal sex work. As of this writing,

Nevada state law prohibits prostitution or solicitation except in licensed houses of prostitution

(NRS 201.354). These houses cannot be situated in any county with more than 700,000 residents

(which only excludes Las Vegas’s Clark County) on any principal business street, or within 400

yards of any schoolhouse or church (NRS 201.390; NRS 201.380). Sex workers must obtain

work cards indicating their status as independent contractors and cannot engage in paid sex if

they test positive for exposure to HIV (NRS 201.358). To ensure compliance, sex workers at

Nevada’s legal brothels undergo testing for sexually transmitted diseases once a week and blood

testing once a month. Finally, brothel advertising is prohibited in any county, city, or town where

prostitution is prohibited by local ordinance (NRS 201.440). These restrictions limit brothel

visibility but otherwise provide substantial latitude for local communities to customize

regulations of brothel prostitution as they deem appropriate for their particular regions.

Historically, then, brothel owners agreed to be hidden as a compromise to exist.

However, as the number of operating brothels dwindles to a couple dozen establishments

scattered across the state, pressure may be mounting to increase visibility (Brents, Jackson, &


Hausbeck, 2010). Most notably, Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch and six other

brothels in the state, has ignored the common adage among brothel owners to “keep your head

below the sagebrush” by hosting three seasons of an HBO series, Cathouse, in the now-famous

Moundhouse, Nevada brothel. Although some brothel owners criticize Hof’s approach for fear

that attracting attention might threaten their tentative existence, most owners have developed

their own methods for gaining recognition in the communities in which they are situated.

The history of marginalizing and stigmatizing sex work seems difficult to reconcile with

the publicity stunts and philanthropic efforts of contemporary legal brothels. However, it is

precisely this dynamic that prompted the research questions that guided our study. We ask, how

does this revelation-concealment dialectic influence the organizational practices of legal

brothels? And, given these dialectical tensions, how do legal brothel organizations manage core-

stigma as they construct public images? By examining the strategic actions organizations take to

manage the tension between revelation and concealment, we might gain insights into transferable

techniques that can be adopted by other shadowed organizations.

Methods

Organizations do not speak except through a ventriloqual relationship with humans and

objects (Bencherki & Cooren, 2011). Therefore, to access the brothels’ strategies for managing

these contradictory desires to be visible and hidden, this study draws upon qualitative interviews

with constituent members of Nevada’s legal brothels. These human agents create many of the

observable actions through which the organization is brought into existence, so through these

interviews, we learn about the “organization’s” strategic responses to dialectical tension.

After receiving Institutional Review Board approval, we began securing access to the

brothels. Informed by previous scholars’ efforts to gain entrée to these same organizations (e.g.,


Brents, et al., 2010), we began by cold-calling and sending emails to the legal brothels and

requesting to speak with the owner about participating in a study on how they build and maintain

relationships with the surrounding community. In the end we gained access to eight brothels in

three different counties. Half of the research sites allowed us to set up appointments in advance,

which ensured on-site interview opportunities with owners, managers, and sex workers.

However, for four of the brothels, we simply requested a tour of the facility when we arrived and

asked questions as the opportunities arose. Tours are typically offered at the brothels to curious

tourists, so our requests were not unordinary. However, two of the sites refused our tour requests

and, upon deeper research, we learned that a city ordinance in that particular area prohibited

women in the brothels unless they possessed a work card. In each site where we did gain access,

we introduced ourselves as researchers so our tour guide would be able to offer consent for us to

include her comments in our study.

In order to protect the identities of these participants, we agreed not to attribute

statements to particular brothels. Furthermore, although most sex workers in the state adopt

“stage names” in order to protect their given birth-names, we chose not to use these work-

pseudonyms in our paper either as they still function as identifiers that could potentially link

participants to their confidential comments. No participants were paid for their time and all were

informed that their comments would be used for research purposes.

We used a semi-structured interview protocol to loosely guide our interviews, asking

questions such as: What stories do you think are not being told enough about this organization in

the media and in the community? What do you do to influence the way outsiders think of this

organization? and How do you manage the stigma that’s often associated with sex work? All

interviews were audio recorded and subsequently transcribed for analysis. In the end, we


conducted interviews with 17 people: three brothel owners, ten current or former sex workers;

and four individuals who held other positions in the brothel (e.g., risk manager, bartender, or

brothel manager). In addition to these on-site visits, we gained insights into community-brothel

relations by interviewing the sole lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Owners’ Association, George

Flint, who agreed to be identified in this paper due to the public nature of his role and the

singularity of his position. Although we observed many customers, we did not interview them

due to our specific interest in the organization’s image-management work. The interview data

generated a total of 14 hours and 22 minutes of audio recordings which were transcribed into 303

pages of single-spaced text.

Most site visits required substantial travel, as Nevada’s brothels are located in relatively

remote locations (six of the eight brothels were located 3-5 hours away from one of Nevada’s

three major cities: Carson City, Reno, or Las Vegas). Therefore, upon leaving each site, we

would turn on the audio recorder and engage in a debriefing process which McDonald (2005)

described as a “tape dump.” We would begin by narratively describing aspects of the visit that

would not be captured by our on-site audio recording such as participants’ dress, grooming, and

nonverbal communication; the brothel architecture, location, layout, decoration, and cleanliness;

and moments of unarticulated emotion experienced by the researchers during interviews. We

also attempted to recapture interactions that occurred when the audio recorder was turned off. In

total, we produced four hours of audio-recorded debriefing notes, which resulted in 134 single-

spaced pages of text. This process of retrospective sense-making was an important aspect of our

analytical process. Through these debriefing notes, we begin noticing initial themes and

developing a shared interpretation of events as we grappled aloud with our individual

observations, sensations, and impressions.


Our personal relationships to this project influence the ways we analyzed our data.

Because sex work can be a sensitive topic, the people we interviewed and others hearing about

our research are often curious about our positions on sex work. We see sex workers and other

legal workers in hidden organizations as potentially marginalized or silenced because of their

occupations. Hearing perspectives from potentially silenced voices is of interest to us as feminist

organizational communication scholars. Neither of us had a previous relationship to these

organizations prior to conducting this research; rather we came to study brothels because of

proximity to a unique group of organizations.

Data analysis occurred in iterative waves (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002; Strauss & Corbin,

1990) and occurred throughout the project. Early analysis began in the tape dumps, as we

debriefed the interviews and observations together after the experience. Early themes developed

in these debriefing sessions shaped subsequent interviews. When we finished collecting data, we

proceeded to formal analysis by grouping the data into rough categories and themes. Using this

inductive technique, themes emerged from the data. We analyzed our original categories which

then expanded and collapsed, until some themes proved more striking than others. We achieved

data validity by comparing our individual analyses of events, comments, and themes. In the

following section, we present the results of these analytical processes.

Results

Like many core-stigmatized organizations, Nevada’s legal brothels hide in remote

locations, conceal the identities of their constituent members, and strictly monitor breaches of

organizational boundaries. However, through this study, we found that the strategies of these

organizations are not limited to hiding. Furthermore, in these results, we demonstrate that hiding

and revealing can be selective and simultaneous processes. We begin by discussing how


visibility concerns influence brothels’ organizational practices. Then, we define the target

audience for this selective (in)visibility and explore the image-management processes at play

when these shadowed organizations choose to make visible/invisible particular aspects of their

organizational practices.

Lying Low in the Sagebrush: Maintaining Privacy and Safety

Nevada’s brothels are only legal in very specific geographic locations. These locations

tend to be rural and remote. Therefore, in order to survive as an economic organization, legal

brothels must attract clients to these hidden sites and, in order to survive as a legal organization,

they must build support for their existence among local voters. The few state laws that exist on

legal prostitution compound these challenges. One such law, for example, outlines strict

limitations against brothel advertisements in print publications, public theaters, streets, or

highways, or in any city or town where prostitution is prohibited by local ordinance or state

statute. Essentially, this law means brothels cannot advertise except in the geographic areas

where the activity is legal, but these few isolated locations are intentionally removed from the

population centers of the state where potential clients and voters reside. Therefore, it is important

to emphasize that regulation decisions and judgments are at least partially made by people in

places where both the practice and the promotion of legal prostitution is prohibited. Thus,

although brothels need to project a socially-acceptable organizational image in order to survive,

laws limit their ability to build organizational visibility.

The hidden nature of these organizations is not viewed entirely as an oppressive

circumstance by everyone. In fact, remote locations and laws limiting advertising help to

construct the brothels as discreet--private and safe--organizations. Brothel owners, managers,

and sex workers alike described to us the efforts they make to, in the words of one interviewee,


“Lay low in the sagebrush. We've got a legal business, just keep it quiet, and just make your

money.” One brothel owner compared this philosophy toward hiding to the health privacy act

HIPAA:

Unless I went to high school with 'em or have an intimate relationship with their family -

unless somebody speaks to me first, out in public, it's kinda like HIPAA. As a nurse, you

don't say, “Oh! It was nice to see you in the clinic today!” I don’t talk to them.

Although the predominant explanation for lying low in the sagebrush is for the brothels to

project an image of discretion and to avoid embarrassing other community members, one brothel

owner offered a different explanation. According to this interviewee, staying out of the public

eye is also a protective measure in the best interest of the brothels’ constituent members:

If the male animal in the outside world identifies you as being a working girl, they will

approach you differently. Maybe even dangerously. And so one of the things that the

house brings is a safe zone to have and play the games. But if you are in the outside

world… especially in a bar setting or any kind of a business setting, the male animal will

respond differently, in my opinion, to a lady that is a known working lady. So it’s more

dangerous. So it’s wise that they keep their identities and what they do quiet and private

and really it’s for their safety.

This explanation of safety is also used to justify enforcing curfew agreements and/or providing

drivers, which facilitate limited mobility of sex workers during their contract periods.

Sex workers, clients, and other organizational stakeholders find additional protection

from interaction with outsiders in the layout of the typical brothel. Every brothel included in this

study was similarly designed. Most locations had a gate or locked door at the entrance, requiring

outsiders to be “buzzed in” by a brothel manager. When the buzzer rings, a bell alerts sex

workers that outsiders will be entering the organization. This warning allows everyone inside the

building an opportunity to hide or present themselves before the outsiders enter. The first room is

always a common space (e.g., lounge, bar, restaurant) that visitors can access regardless of

whether they are interested in more intimate services. Managerial offices, sex workers’


bedrooms/workspaces, and other spaces available for purchase were always located beyond this

common space, down a hallway or behind a locked door that required additional access. These

architectural elements serve to hide the most stigmatized core-services of the organization from

all but those people who gain entry by authorized agents of the organization. Additionally, these

features keep stakeholders invisible while they engage in core-stigmatized practices.

By “lying low in the sagebrush,” brothels maintain their right to exist as a legal business

“not bothering anybody else.” Additionally, the remote locations and rules regarding who is

allowed to move in and out of organizational spaces allow the brothels to protect the identities of

affiliated stakeholders and maintain their claims of discretion and safety from potentially hostile

outsiders.

Neon Signs and Twitter Accounts: Building Organizational Visibility

Overemphasizing the ways in which these external legal limitations and internal desires

for privacy and safety have hidden the brothels obscures the giant billboards and neon signs that

point to these not-so-secret locations. In addition to these roadside attempts to build

organizational visibility, nearly all of the currently-open brothels in Nevada also have an active

online presence, including in some cases social media accounts such as Twitter. In a weekly staff

meeting we attended at one brothel, a substantial portion of the meeting revolved around the

topic of building an online presence. The brothel owner told the present sex workers, “If you’re

not on those chat boards, you’re losing yourself a lot of money.” He went on to stress the

importance of participating in podcasts and re-tweeting popular posts on Twitter to direct online

traffic to their personal pages. Importantly, sex workers maintain a lot of control in how their

personal information is used in these instances of building organizational visibility, and client

privacy is always the brothel’s primary concern, as explained by this brothel manager:


If the ladies don’t want to be identified on pictures, they’re not in, of course. Actual

names are forbidden. I have no idea what their real names are and I’ve been here four

years. It’s highly confidential on both sides. We’ve never had a customer outed ever.

And the customers appreciate that.

In this way, when brothels seek to reveal some aspect of the organization to a wider public, they

generally offer affiliated individuals choice regarding their level of personal visibility. Individual

sex workers choose whether to allow use of their personal image for brothel promotions.

The most vocal proponent of the revelation pole of the dialectic is brothel owner Dennis

Hof. Referencing his decision to publicize the Moonlite Bunny Ranch through an HBO series,

Hof told one reporter, “A high-profile approach brings higher-quality girls and better-quality

customers” (Tanner, 2006). Although few brothel owners embrace this approach as completely

as Hof does, many of them acknowledge the increasing value of being seen and known in their

own local communities, as articulated by this brothel owner:

There’s a word in Nevada about if you’re a brothel, you better stay below the sagebrush.

As long as you stay below those, you’re not gonna stir anybody up that’s gonna get after

you. So we’ve broken that mold a tiny bit because we have become very corporate-

oriented. But I’m a marketing guy. And so am I gonna sponsor a major event or a

baseball team? So there’s two sides to that coin: one, marketing is great for our business

to spread, but it also spreads the wealth and the goodwill and identifies or solidifies the

fact that you are giving back to the community that’s giving to you.

In this way, even brothel owners that tend to align themselves more closely to the normative

dictate to “lie low in the sagebrush” recognize the value and necessity of projecting a particular

organizational image in the surrounding communities.

Stigma-Management Strategies of Shadowed Organizations

As brothels construct images for external consumption, the elements they choose to

reveal and conceal are strategically chosen with attention to managing stigma. Importantly, the

stigma-management strategies of interest in this analysis are directed toward a specific category

of stakeholder audiences. Because brothels are only legal in certain parts of Nevada and


organizational practices are largely regulated based on local policies, with few exceptions these

organizations tend to focus their communication toward a fairly limited and local audience. Even

still, the target audience for organizational visibility work does not include all members of a

brothel’s local audience; rather, they tend to focus their stigma-management energies on

projecting a particular image to a stakeholder group we describe as “potentially stigmatizing

stakeholders.”

In some ways, it is easiest to define this audience by what they are not. The label

“potentially stigmatizing stakeholders” excludes brothel owners, managers, bartenders, and sex

workers who might identify with the brothel as an organizational affiliation. These people might

experience shame or privacy concerns but have generally come to the brothels with full

knowledge of the stigma surrounding the industry. Similarly, suppliers that work with the

brothels are often industry insiders or otherwise willing to voluntarily associate with the industry

in the service of business. Clients, who are also excluded from this group, seek out the brothel at

times precisely because of the reason it is stigmatized. The label “potentially stigmatizing

stakeholders” also excludes those individuals and organizations that oppose the industry for

deep-seated moral or philosophical reasons. Very little image-management by the brothel is

likely to persuade these audiences to change their opinions. “Potentially stigmatizing

stakeholders,” therefore, are those remaining members of local communities who vote in local

elections and spend money in local businesses who could eventually be asked to weigh in on the

brothels’ continued existence through voting or consumer power.

Nevada Brothel Owners’ Association lobbyist George Flint spoke to us about the

importance of image-management with this audience:

About 20 years ago one of the members of the county commission who now is Justice of

the Peace in Tonopah, he got a burr under his saddle about the brothels. He pressed the


issue for a county vote. I didn't want to see a county vote and I'll tell you why. At that

time, Pahrump was just beginning to really grow. There were something like 2,000

people a month moving into the area. Pahrump went from a community of 4,000 or less

people to almost 40,000 people during that period. I knew that most of those people were

so new to Nevada that they wouldn't have any sort of Nevada feeling for the matter.

They would be just like the people of Minnesota or Kansas or anywhere in the Bible Belt:

“Sure, why don't we get rid of them, maybe they're a negative.”

The idea that a “sort of Nevada feeling for the matter” of legal sex work could be cultivated over

time indicates the importance of strategic, selective (in)visibility of the brothels among these

potentially stigmatizing stakeholders. To manage the potential development or cultivation of

negative social evaluations of legal sex work, the brothels actively work to promote a projected

image to these audiences that might reframe core-stigma into a more socially-acceptable

organizational image. Therefore, in contrast to existing studies of core-stigmatized organizations

that have emphasized concealment strategies (Hudson, 2008; Hudson & Okhuysen, 2009), we

suggest in these results that some shadowed organizations actively work to promote recognizable

organizational images, but that these image-projection efforts are tempered by simultaneous

desires to keep certain organizational attributes hidden (such as some policies, practices, and

member affiliations). In examining the brothels’ decisions about what aspects of the organization

to make visible or keep hidden, we find ourselves considering the stigma-management strategies

of passing and enactment.

Passing strategies. First, brothels adopt passing strategies insofar as they seek to distance

themselves from socially undesirable identities and avoid anticipated threats. In this section, we

elaborate on the ways in which Nevada’s legal brothels distance themselves from identities they

perceive as socially undesirable and align themselves with non-stigmatized industry practices as

means of stigma-management. In so doing, the brothels strive to conceal those practices that


affirm negative evaluations of the industry among potentially-stigmatizing stakeholders, and they

work to increase the visibility of more widely-accepted practices.

Distancing from socially undesirable identities. With this first strategy, brothel workers

recognize their work as “edgy” but demonstrate that strategic decisions were made in order to

limit the transgressive nature of their organizational practices. Consider, for example, this

excerpt from our interview with a brothel owner:

In the beginning as an edgy business, there were those that were concerned or held us in

contempt or were undecided about how we fit. And you earn your right to anything. You

earn your right to respect, you earn your right to the marketing. I don’t care what the

product is you start with, whether it be makeup or soft drinks or anything else you’re

coming to the community with, people aren’t going to buy you in the beginning, you

know, you have to become an accepted entity.

In calling the work “edgy”, participants like this brothel owner recognized the precarious nature

of their relationship with certain members of the surrounding community. In an effort to

“become an accepted entity,” brothels often employed the stigma-management strategy of

concealing or minimizing their similarities to other undesirable identities. The most prevalent

way that this strategy was employed was by drawing distinctions between legal and illegal

prostitution.

Lobbyist George Flint demonstrated this strategy when he described the greatest

communication challenge he perceives as a political advocate for legal prostitution:

This industry is generally comingled with the illegal industry… And illegal prostitution is

seedy, insidious, it’s fraught with the worst of the worst of human beings that are

involved, using women, using children, using young men. And they’re dealing drugs.

They’re doing all of these horrible things in the shadows of the world in every city in

America. And so the world perceives us as being that. So when you say “prostitution”

that’s what everybody perceives. And that’s part of the communication challenge. We

are, in the State of Nevada, a legal business. And so Nevada chose, for whatever reason,

with the legislative level and the counties, to embrace it. And to me the important

communication there is that it’s legal and controlled.


In contrast to Flint, critics of legal brothels argue that legal owners and illegal pimps both profit

from the sale of sexual acts offered by prostitutes, most of the services rendered are identical,

and many legal sex workers experience oppressive limitations on their mobility while under

contract (Farley, 2007). Concealing the similarities between legal and illegal prostitution

suggests that the visibility brothels seek is not absolute.

A brothel floor manager suggested that the organizational structure and “house rules” of

the brothel setting distinguish legal prostitution from the “insidious” practices of illegal

streetwalking described by Flint:

Inside the house even we don't allow them to bring any drugs and alcohol in. I do random

drug tests. I do random room searches and they're not allowed to bring any alcohol in, so

when they do go to the grocery store or somewhere their bags are looked through when

they get back in the house.

Policies against drug and alcohol use in the workplace are typical in organizational settings.

However, sex workers typically live in the brothels for the duration of their contract period,

which, depending on how they choose to write their contracts, typically last for several weeks or

months at a time.

In support of the distinction between legal and illegal prostitution, the presence of state

laws and house rules require that legal brothel workers uphold certain standards of

professionalism, safety, and health that simply do not exist on the street, as one sex worker

described to us:

They could call me a prostitute. But, you know if that's what they wanna do, that's fine.

But I would want them to know what it is. You know. I'm not a street walker. And people

classify [another sex worker at the house] and I with the people in Vegas who are

wearing like nothing, who don't get STD tested and are having sex behind dumpsters.

In these constructions of difference between legal and illegal prostitution, workers define brothel

activities within a realm of relatively limited deviance--they are participating in an industry that


is “edgy,” but its adherence to legal dictates sets boundaries on their transgressive nature in a

way that meaningfully distinguishes brothel prostitution from street prostitution.

In addition to making this distinction between legal and illegal prostitution, brothel

workers also attempted to distance themselves from other identities that they perceived as

socially undesirable in their defense of organizational practices limiting the types of sexual

services offered in the brothel setting. For example, consider this excerpt from one brothel owner

who argued that prohibiting male-male sex in his brothels limits the transgressive nature of legal

prostitution:

Despite all the gambling 24 hours a day, drink until your liver falls out, buy sex

everywhere, [Nevada is] very conservative. So, if these conservatives sitting around say

you mean those boys, they're sucking dick, is that what you're telling me? That could be

the end of the business. As hypocritical as it is, I've seen some cowboys sitting around the

table - it's okay for women to do that. That's part of the sexist BS of the world, right? It's

okay for you girls to do that but men, oh no, not that. Women doing lesbian stuff, that's

cool but men blowing each other, no. So I stay away from it.

In this excerpt, the brothel owner justifies his decision to only hire women by claiming that this

organizational practice aligns with local assessments which view male-male sex as more deviant

than female-female sex. Therefore, by only hiring women, he ensures that a metaphorical line is

drawn, demonstrating distance from sexual practices he views as more socially undesirable.

However, revealing this organizational practice simultaneously conceals the number of sexually

deviant requests that are regularly fulfilled as part of the brothels’ core-service. Both of these

practices--distinguishing between legal/illegal prostitution and avoiding male-male sex--are

employed by brothel workers in an effort to distance themselves from socially undesirable

identities.

Drawing analogies to non-stigmatized industries. In contrast to the first strategy, which

acknowledges the core-stigma of sex work, this second strategy attempts to make more visible


similarities to non-stigmatized industries as a means to normalize the brothels’ deviant practices.

This normalization occurs at least in part by highlighting the professionalization of the industry,

whereby certain bureaucratic policies and procedures have been embedded into the

organizational structure. In order to work at the brothels, potential sex workers must undergo

weekly testing and monthly blood work to test for sexually transmitted diseases. Upon receiving

clearance, a potential sex worker applies for a work card at the local sheriff’s office. Pending a

background check, applicants become registered with the city or county as a licensed sex worker.

As independent contractors, these sex workers draft their contracts individually with the

brothel owners, establishing mutually agreeable shift schedules. Prices are negotiated with each

client, and the brothel receives a 50% cut of each transaction, which pays for many operating

needs including utilities, laundry services, maintenance, meals, and salaries for floor managers,

bartenders, security guards, and other employees. Sex workers rent their rooms (in the same way

that hairdressers rent chairs at a salon), so most of them choose to live in those spaces during the

entirety of their contract period.

The main office of a brothel contains time cards, schedule charts, and files containing

personnel and health records on all of the independent contractors. When a client chooses a

contractor, they begin by negotiating prices, time, and services. Once an agreement is reached,

the contractor will take the payment to the main office and relay the agreement to a floor

manager. The manager will set a timer and when time runs out, the manager typically uses an

intercom to inform the contractor that it is time to renegotiate.

This bureaucratization of sex services contributes to brothel workers’ strategy of

normalizing deviant practices. The similarities between these bureaucratic procedures and the

organizational practices typical of numerous other professionalized settings make drawing


analogies between sex work and non-stigmatized industries simple. The most common analogy

used by brothel owners was to sales, as demonstrated most clearly by one brothel, which actually

gives all new hires a copy of the book Selling Luxury as their introduction to the house. This

analogy to sales was reiterated by two different interviewees:

The simplest description of our business is a highly motivated sales team that sells sexual

experience. That experience could be a hug, it could be anal. It could be anything in

between.

We teach sales… We have a board, if you stop by the cashier, and every single day on

that chalk board they put up the elements of professional selling. And, you know, it’s the

sales thought of the day on how to do whatever you’re doing. So we’re approaching it as

a business just exactly the way it should be. And if you get me on the fact of what we’re

selling or what we’re doing or what’s going on, really the bottom line is it is just a service

business.

The exact nature of that service, however, is established through analogies to specific non-

stigmatized industries.

Specifically, brothel workers compared sex work to caregiving, therapy, and education.

One owner described in some detail the compassion that is needed in brothel work, describing

the contractors as “caregivers” who provide much needed care services to their clients:

We have individuals that life has challenged… They have frailties, they’re overweight

terribly, they have a hard time finding partners within the world that they’re accessible.

They have diseases of different kinds. They’re paraplegic. They’ve had horrible industrial

accidents or military. There have lost body parts. And so having, with dignity, to be in the

hands of a caregiver who will-and it’s not necessarily sex. I’m gonna tell you that maybe

30, 35 percent of our business does not include the act of intimacy and sex. It includes the

acts of kindness, of loving, of a massage, of petting your head, of watching a movie, of

telling you you’re all right.

Another sex worker compared this service to therapy:

We build people's confidence… Like I have a disabled man who comes and sees me all

the time and he's like, "I never thought that I could ever have a pretty girl even talk to me

and stuff." And he goes, "You've like made my whole life of being teased like feel gone

when I'm with you."

Another spoke specifically about working with virgins and the educational work of teaching


inexperienced sexual partners about the female body:

I had a dwarf actually come in yesterday who was a virgin. And he was 18 years old, just

graduated high school. Never even been kissed… Most of our party it was just like

cuddling, caressing, touching. Like he’d never touched a woman’s body. Like an actual

woman besides his mother.

These comparisons to non-stigmatized industries of sales, service, caregiving, therapy, and

education serve as a legitimating discourse, normalizing deviant practices through analogy.

Enactment strategies. In addition to the passing strategies described above, brothels also

challenge stigmatizing characterizations or the values of stigmatizing audiences through

enactment strategies that promote interaction between organizational insiders and potentially

stigmatizing audiences. In this section we describe how brothels invited controlled outsider

boundary-crossings and promoted their own community-engagement efforts as ways of revealing

attributes of the organization that tend to be lesser-known to these potentially-stigmatizing

stakeholders.

Inviting controlled outsider boundary-crossings. Historically, anyone other than paying

customers was discouraged from entering the brothels in order to maintain privacy for both

clients and workers. However, recently, brothel owners have begun to see opportunities for

challenging misperceptions about the brothel industry by opening their doors to broader publics.

Students in Human Sexuality and Business classes at the University of Nevada, Reno visit

brothels and talk with sex workers as part of the courses. Another brothel opens their doors to the

Red Hat Society, a social group for women aged 50 and older, for occasional social events that

include drinks, dancing, and karaoke with the brothel workers. In one of our interviews, a

participant described these interactions with outside social groups:

The Red Hats, they gotta be 50 years old. They gotta wear purple and red and they come

in here…When we had cages, they got in the cages and danced. They danced on the pole.

They liked to dance—and they’re darling. And we’ve had probably 15 different clubs


come through—because they’re looking for places to go that are a little edgy. They’re our

friends. They’re our voters…They wanna meet and hang out with us and have a good

time.

Importantly, in these instances where efforts to increase organizational visibility means inviting

outsider boundary-crossing into the brothel, sex workers again maintain control over the

disclosure of their affiliation with the organization. One local sex worker talked to us about how

she would avoid interactions with people she recognized as a means of maintaining control over

her privacy: “When I first started I would always do this little peep around the corner thing.

Well, I would tell the office, hey, I know this person. I'm gonna sit this one out.”

Most brothel insiders, though, expressed enjoyment in these opportunities to dispel myths

through these boundary-crossing events. One brothel owner said about his efforts to bring

members of the media and the community into the brothels:

I'm communicating with the world. My dream is to paint prostitution in a different light

as how it should be not how it is… So when I'm out there telling the world come into my

house, my old whorehouse, come on in here and take a look around. They say, you know

what, that isn't so bad.

One argument for engaging in these controlled boundary-crossings, then, is based on the belief

that many negative judgments of brothel prostitution are rooted in misinformation and

misperception, which can be alleviated through increased contact with potentially stigmatizing

stakeholders. Importantly, these carefully planned interactions tend to take place in the common

areas of the brothel and they emphasize the fun, mundane, and non-deviant practices of the

brothel, while the more core-stigmatized services remain obscured behind closed doors.

Promoting community engagement activities. This belief about the value of increased

contact with outsiders is reiterated by those brothel owners advocating that brothel workers be

more visible in their communities. Especially in the small rural towns, rules of conduct apply

outside of the house as much as inside, as the brothel workers are representatives of the


organization in the community. One manager of a rural brothel said of the sex workers, “The

ladies have a lot of rules here. They have to be respectful and act like ladies inside and outside

the house and always - they see people in the grocery stores and stuff.” Several brothel workers

suggested that they are aware of themselves as representing the brothel, especially when they are

in the community with well-known brothel owners.

These brothel owners come to be highly recognizable in the region because many of them

are among the biggest philanthropists in the state. Making strategic donations is an important

part of these visibility efforts. The list of charitable donations made by the brothels is truly

astounding: donating food to the local food pantries, buying life preservers for the search and

rescue team, funding Meals on Wheels, raising money for high school band uniforms, sponsoring

little league teams, driving machinery to help construct a town equestrian center, furnishing

backpack programs to provide weekend meals for needy families, running the grill at community

festivals, etc. For one brothel owner, strategic giving creates conditions for reciprocal support if

favors are ever needed in the future: “We do business in the county where we make our money.

So if we ever run into any obstacles or push back we call up and say hey, you need to start

calling some people and they do it.”

However, not all philanthropic efforts by the brothels are welcomed. Nearly all brothel

workers had stories to tell about donations that were rejected and services that were denied due

to their affiliation with a local brothel. One brothel owner told us about how his efforts to raise

money to fund high school band uniforms attracted attention from anti-brothel audiences in the

community:

Then, the people that didn't give a damn about this they get up in arms: “I can't believe

the brothel is raising money for the uniforms!” They started whining to the county. The

county can't handle the heat and says we'll take care of it. They didn't have the money but

all of a sudden they found the money because they needed this thing to die down.


The stigma associated with the brothel industry at times interferes with their ability to see

enactment practices through to completion as these intended images of brothel-as-philanthropist

are occasionally intercepted by opposition groups before reaching a wider audience.

These acts of community involvement, media performance, and philanthropy generally

support brothel efforts to build visibility of pro-social organizational attributes. Some brothel

workers hope that the more people see of the brothels, the more they will understand and accept

them as socially-acceptable organizations providing a service to a particular population.

However, others are more cynical about achieving that level of acceptance and merely hope that

their presence in these communities will build reciprocal dependence, wherein the communities

will support brothels’ existence so they can continue to benefit from these economic and

charitable contributions.

Discussion

This project explored the ways that core-stigmatized organizations worked within the

confines of laws and public pressure to build strategic organizational visibility while protecting

privacy and safety concerns of organizational insiders such as workers and clients who wished to

keep their affiliation unknown. In this way, brothels’ status as a hidden organization serves

certain audiences well—businesses and residents who view the organizations as undesirable

neighbors, anti-brothel individuals and organizations, legislators hoping to appease these

stakeholder groups, and organizational insiders, clients, and suppliers who wish to keep their

affiliation with the organization secret. However, these discreet locations also pose challenges

for attracting new business and making visible shared values and less recognized qualities of the

organization and its members to potentially persuadable local residents and voters.


In managing this revelation-concealment dialectic, Nevada brothels concealed aspects of

their identities that they feared would affirm negative evaluations of the organization and

employed passing and enactment strategies in order to manage core-stigma as they constructed

public organizational images. Specifically, they distanced themselves from socially undesirable

identities, drew analogies to non-stigmatized industries, and constructed selectively-permeable

organizational boundaries to build familiarity with external community members. These

strategies helped the brothels grapple with the tension between “lying low in the sagebrush” and

increasing visibility, both of which are necessary in order for the brothels to survive.

Taken together, these results suggest that the visibility needs of shadowed organizations

make hiding alone an insufficient strategy for core-stigmatized organizations. However, the

presence of core-stigma complicates some shadowed organizations’ ability to manage this

concealment-revelation dialectic. After all, as brothels attempt to address their “reputation

problem” (Scott, 2013) by revealing enigmatic aspects of themselves to outsiders as a means of

challenging stigma, those aspects they work to conceal may also find their way out of the

shadows.

These conclusions have serious implications for shadowed organizations and their

affiliated members. Shadowed organizations, like the brothels, have visibility needs that lead

them to adopt revelation practices that may limit their ability to maintain control and promise

discretion to their members. At the same time, people who work in shadowed organizations have

privacy needs that lead them to adopt concealment practices that may negatively impact their pay

and/or undermine organizational image-work.

Shadowed organizations are left with few options for managing their revelation-

concealment tensions. One approach is to find ways to heighten organizational visibility without


implicating members. However, because constituent members are the human agents through

which organizations are able to act (Bencherki & Cooren, 2011), concealing them may be

counterproductive to visibility efforts. Furthermore, as organizations increase their visibility they

open up the possibility that attributes of the organization they are trying to keep concealed

(including certain constituent members) become revealed, which leads to a constant fear of being

outed. A second approach is to challenge the stigma that makes members want their affiliations

to remain concealed. The enactment strategies discussed in this paper provide a starting point for

understanding how shadowed organizations attempt this process.

This analysis adds complexity to Scott’s (2013) framework regarding organizational

visibility and member silence in shadowed organizations by drawing attention to the ways in

which both the organization and its members selectively and simultaneously engage in

revelation-concealment practices. In crafting an external image, these legal brothels strive to

make visible those aspects of the organizations that challenge core-stigma by drawing parallels

to non-stigmatized organizations, inviting outsiders to participate in controlled boundary-

crossings, and promoting community engagement. However, in so doing, the brothels

simultaneously conceal deviant practices and tightly control outsider visits to limit what aspects

of the organization are visible. As for the members, those people affiliated with the brothel

generally tend to keep their affiliations secret, but are encountering mounting pressure to

increase visibility as they are encouraged to participate in building the organization’s online

presence and act as representatives in the surrounding communities.

A limitation of this study is our focus on organizational-level strategies. Considering that

Scott’s (2013) view of hidden organizations very much includes a concern about the extent to

which members are silent or expressive about their affiliation, future studies should investigate


individual-level practices of clients, workers, and other organizational insiders to manage

privacy and identity issues in hidden organizations. Nevada’s legal brothels, along with

anonymous support groups, hate groups, abortion clinics, and other shadowed organizations,

present particular challenges for privacy management because many organizations in this

category are highly motivated to build and maintain some form of organizational visibility but

their members seek to keep affiliations unknown. Scholars investigating organizations engaged

in “dirty work” (Hughes, 1951) provide a starting point for understanding how the presence of

stigma can complicate other aspects of organizational life, but additional research is needed to

understand how privacy-management concerns interact with individual-level constructs such as

work-life balance, sense of self, and emotional labor.

Additionally, much could be learned by comparing the findings of this study of the

shadowed organizational practices of Nevada’s legal brothels to more obscure regions of

organizational life such as illegal sex trafficking organizations or other, more hidden, stigmatized

organizations. In this dark region of organizational studies, stakeholder and organizational

privacy needs are more closely aligned, which may provide greater insights into how individuals

and organizations collude to avoid visibility or other ways in which they manage privacy

concerns.

In conclusion, brothels, as shadowed organizations, manage the revelation-concealment

dialectic by constructing selectively permeable boundaries, through which they attempt to

maintain control over access to information and protect vulnerability of private information. In

their efforts to make visible more socially-positive organizational images, brothels oscillate

between passing and enactment strategies. By engaging in stigma-management strategies, they

attempt to influence potentially stigmatizing audiences’ perceptions of the stigma associated with


sex work. To the extent that brothels succeed in distancing themselves from socially undesirable

identities, they decouple themselves from the stigma associated with more transgressive practices

and justify their practices within the context of providing a desired service to meet an economic

demand. In additional efforts to pass, brothels conform to familiar institutional structures and

draw analogies to non-stigmatized organizations. Enactment strategies hold potential to build

connections with community members across organizational boundaries as the brothel creates

opportunities for controlled interactions. Further research into these brothels and other similarly

situated core-stigmatized organizations can begin to help us understand more about this

important type of hidden organization in our society.


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