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Who is to Blame? Scapegoating in Complex Organizations

Author(s): Maurizio Catino

Wednesday 14  |   15:00-15:20

Room: TP52

Session: Crime and deviance

A large cruise ship sinks after hitting some outcropping rocks near the shore. Who is to blame? In the face of negative events – accidents, corporate scandals, crises and bankruptcies – there are two organizational strategies for managing blame. The first is to take full responsibility for the event and to implement adequate corrective measures. The second is to create one or more scapegoats by transferring blame to some of the people directly involved in the event. In this way, the organization can appear blameless and avoid costly remedial interventions. Scapegoating will be analyzed by examining the Costa Concordia ship accident (Italy, 2012) and employing a perspective that considers the scapegoat as the outcome of a construction process by multiple agents, both internal and external to an organization. The indictment of individuals and their transformation into scapegoats becomes a useful expedient for delaying or avoiding structural changes, since public opinion is led to think that exemplary punishment of the person responsible for the error can serve as a deterrent in the future. The paper highlights the limits of explanations centered on guilt and individual solutions to organizational problems and underlines the need for a different civic epistemology. The purpose of this paper is to systematically understand how and why organizations create scapegoats. In doing so, the paper outlines a general theory of scapegoating in organizations.