Harming by Deceit: Epistemic Malevolence and Organizational Wrongdoing.

Research on organizational epistemic vice alleges that some organizations are epistemically malevolent, i.e. they habitually harm others by deceiving them. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on epistemic malevolence. We connect the discussion of epistemic malevolence to the empirical literature on organizational deception. The existing empirical literature does not pay sufficient attention to the impact of an organization's ability to control compromising information on its deception strategy. We address this gap by studying eighty high-penalty corporate misconduct cases between 2000 and 2020 in the United States. We find that organizations use two different strategies to deceive: Organizations 'sow doubt' when they contest information about them or their impacts that others have access to. By contrast, organizations 'exploit trust' when they deceive others by obfuscating, concealing, or falsifying information that they themselves control. While previous research has focused on cases of 'sowing doubt', we find that organizations 'exploit trust' in the majority of cases that we studied. This has important policy implications because the strategy of 'exploiting trust' calls for a different response from regulators and organizations than the strategy of 'sowing doubt'.

Provider-sponsored virtual communities for chronic patients: improving health outcomes through organizational patient-centred knowledge management.

Patients with long-term chronic disease experience numerous illness patterns and disease trends over time, resulting in different sets of knowledge needs than patients who intermittently seek medical care for acute or short-term problems. Health-care organizations can promote knowledge creation and utilization by chronic patients through the introduction of a virtual, private, disease-specific patient community. This virtual socialization alters the role of chronic disease patients from external consumers of health-care services to a 'community of practice' of internal customers so that, with the tacit support of their health-care organization, they have a forum supporting the integration of knowledge gained from the experiences of living with chronic disease in their self-management. Patient-centred health-care organizations can employ the virtual community to direct and support the empowerment of chronic patients in their care.