This study examines how managers and entrepreneurs in stigmatized industries use historical narratives to combat stigma. We examine two industries, the private military contractors (PMC) industry in the United States and the cannabis industry in Canada. In recent decades, the representatives of these industries have worked to reduce the level of stigmatization faced by the industries. We show that historical narratives were used rhetorically by the representatives of both industries. In both cases, these historical narratives were targeted at just one subset of the population. Our research contributes to debates about stigmatization in ideologically diverse societies, an important issue that have been overlooked by the existing literature on stigmatized industries, which tends to assume the existence of homogeneous audiences when researching the efforts of industry representatives to destigmatize their industries.

本研究探讨了被污名化行业的管理者和企业家如何使用历史叙述来对抗污名。我们研究了两个行业，美国的私人军事承包商 (PMC) 行业和加拿大的大麻行业。近几十年来，这些行业的代表一直致力于降低行业面临的污名化程度。我们表明，两个行业的代表都在修辞上使用了历史叙述。在这两种情况下，这些历史叙述都只针对人口的一个子集。我们的研究有助于在意识形态多样化的社会中关于污名化的辩论，这是一个被现有关于污名化行业的文献所忽视的重要问题，