“The Best Defense is a Good Offense:” How Occupational Members Use Moral Offense to Navigate a Shadow of Suspicion about their Work

Despite being a violation of social norms, practices of deception are prevalent in organizations and markets. While existing research has focused on cases of clear-cut fraud, this article studies occupations that operate in a gray zone of deception: they cannot be simply defined as fraudulent, but the potential for deceit casts a shadow of suspicion across their practices. We ask: how and when do members of emerging occupations navigate a shadow of suspicion about their work? Drawing on comparative ethnographic data, we examine the tactics enacted by members of two emerging occupations—career coaches and technology platform evangelists—in their attempts at navigating suspicions of deception. We find that members of both occupations employ a set of tactics that reveal surprising similarities and meaningful differences in how they navigate this shadow of suspicion. Together, we refer to these tactics as moral offense: rather than defending their own probity, they accuse relevant others—social systems, the [audience’s] self, their doubters—of moral failings as a means of normalizing their practices. Their primary tool in moral offense is a symbolic binary between the “old” and the “new” economy. Occupational members leverage this binary to stir up the anxious uncertainty experienced by their audiences, leading them through a process of disorientation and reorientation that they in turn use to construct their moral authority as guides to the unknown. In doing so, these occupational members implicitly reframe structural problems of precarity and uncertainty in the new economy into a call for individual moral awakening and updating of moral orientations. Findings contribute to organizational and sociological theories of deception, occupations, and morality in economic life.