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Destigmatising the recreational cannabis industry
Cannabis is the world's most cultivated, trafficked and used illicit drug, and the move towards its legalisation has given rise to a nascent industry that is attracting increasing attention from investors, manufacturers, and researchers. Due to the plant maintaining its illegal and stigmatised statu...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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School of Management Studies
2023
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| Summary: | Cannabis is the world's most cultivated, trafficked and used illicit drug, and the move towards its legalisation has given rise to a nascent industry that is attracting increasing attention from investors, manufacturers, and researchers. Due to the plant maintaining its illegal and stigmatised status in many countries, cannabis research is limited, which has resulted in a significant gap in imperative knowledge about this burgeoning industry. Although the cannabis industry is clearly making a move from stigmatised to mainstream, little research has been conducted to investigate this transition, more particularly in a South African context. This dissertation investigates destigmatisation processes and strategies employable by cannabis organisations by way of three individual but interconnected studies. They aimed, respectively, to conduct a systematic literature review of organisational destigmatisation and establish a practitioner-driven research agenda; to depict the destigmatisation landscape of South African recreational cannabis organisations through a mixed methods content analysis and finally, to explore the influence of these organisations' destigmatisation strategies on attitudes towards cannabis. Study 1 presents a destigmatisation model as its main contribution, finding that stigma management strategies are classified into six main categories: Conforming, Hiding and Structural Responses were identified as stigma avoidance or perpetuation strategies, and Affirming, Challenging, and Infusing as destigmatisation strategies. Affirming strategies were found to be at the heart of destigmatisation, and an industry-collective approach to destigmatisation was ranked as the most prioritised research need by South African cannabis industry professionals. Study 2 found that Infusing strategies were significantly the most popular of the destigmatisation methods used by South African recreational cannabis organisations, accounting for nearly 80% of the themes, with branding tactics predominant in this category. Key insights revealed that there is a mismatch between the strategies most employed by cannabis businesses and the strategies that exert the strongest influence on attitudes, which Study 3 found to be recontextualisation of the cannabis industry, evidenced by education using scientific facts and figures. These findings highlight that a lack of knowledge is the main barrier to cannabis industry destigmatisation and should be counteracted by the rhetoric activity of educating the public. In summary, this study served to inform destigmatisation processes for core stigmatised organisations - with a focus on the cannabis industry; to catalyse cannabis destigmatisation research in a manner relevant to the South African cannabis industry; to provide a detailed description of the destigmatisation landscape of the South African cannabis industry from an organisational perspective; and, lastly, to determine the most influential destigmatisation strategies from a consumer perspective. |
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