Multi-national corporations are increasingly facing attention and disapproval by different actors, including authorities, public and (non-) commercial organizations. Digital globalization and especially social media as a low-cost, highly interactive and multidirectional platform shape a unique context for this rising attention. In the literature, much attention has been devoted to top-down approaches and strategies that corporations use to avoid stigmatization and sanctioning of their behaviour. Reactions to corporate harm are, however, seldom researched from a labelling perspective. As a result, corporations are not considered as objects towards whom labelling is targeted but rather as actors who hamper such processes and who, as moral entrepreneurs, influence which behaviour is labelled deviant. Based on theoretical analysis of literature and case studies, this article will discuss how the process of labelling has changed in light of the digitalized, late-modern society and consequently, how the process should be revisited to be applicable for corporate deviance. Given a diversification of moral entrepreneurs and increasingly dependency of labelling and meaning-making on the online sphere, two new forms of labelling are introduced that specifically target institutions; that is bottom-up and horizontal labelling.

This paper uses the UK as a vehicle through which to argue that a dominant reductionist drugs discourse exists which simplifies understandings of drug use and drug users leading to socio-cultural misrepresentations of harm, risk and dangerousness. It contends that at the centre of this discourse lies the process of othering – the identification of specific substances and substance users as a threat to UK society. Interestingly, within the wider context of global drug policy reform this othering process appears to be expanding to target a wider variety of factors and actors – those policies, research findings and individuals which contest normative notions, resulting in the marginalisation of ‘alternative voices’ which question the entrenched assumptions associated with drug prohibition. The paper concludes that there is a need for collective action by critical scholars to move beyond the other, calling for academics to be innovative in their research agendas, creative in their dissemination of knowledge and resolute despite the threat of being othered themselves.

This article reflects on some of the qualities and strengths, as well as some potential weaknesses, of a research methodology used to study ‘hard-to-reach’ groups, such as the undocumented. This approach, known as the PEER (Participatory Ethnographic Evaluation and Research) approach, is introduced in terms of its key elements of trust, anonymity, in-depth data and flexibility. Its suitability for sensitive, or ‘liminal’ research issues, involving groups of vulnerable informants, is explained. The method is based on relations of trust, which are maintained through anonymity in data collection, and extend from social researchers to informants, through the intermediation of trained community-based peer researchers. It is they who interview others in their own social networks; since trust is the key ingredient in making this ethically-informed methodology work well, trust must be invested also in the peer researchers, who form part of the research team.