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China Elevator Stories

Scapegoating – How Organizations Assign Blame

Maurizio Catino’s book explains how scapegoating occurs within organizations.

23/10/2024

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Ruth Silbermayr

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Scapegoating - How organizations assign blame

The book Scapegoating – How Organizations Assign Blame by Maurizio Catino starts with these words:

“Suspicion and exasperation, unless they are restrained by reason and charity, possess the sad virtue of causing the unfortunate to be seized as criminals, upon the vainest pretext or the most rash assertion.” (Alessandro Manzoni, The Column of Infamy, 1840)

And further:

“The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952)

If you have ever been made the scapegoat in your life, you may relate to these words. If you have been scapegoated by your abuser, who used the legal and criminal system against you, portrayed himself as the victim, and you, the real victim, as the perpetratoras has recently happened to me—you may also know what I am talking about.

The sociopathic stalker I have had has done this and is still using the authorities to exact revenge on me. The authorities, always happy to help men and abusers, were eager to see him as innocent and me as the criminal who reported him to the police for stalking “for no valid reason.”

If you have ever been stalked over a prolonged period as a woman, you may know how hard it is to collect evidence and report the stalking. Organizations that help women have told me it is futile to stop a stalker in almost any case.

In my experience, I repeatedly tried to make this stalker stop, which led to him becoming completely out of control and escalating his stalking, as well as his sadistic engulfment and attempts to keep me his prisoner.

I have also encountered the phenomenon of organizational scapegoating repeatedly in Austria. The dynamics I have experienced are described in Maurizio Catino’s book:

“One of the largest cruise ships ever built sinks near the coast after hitting some underwater rocks. Several people die in the accident. Who is to blame? When coping with negative events, organizations can choose between two strategies: they can either take responsibility and implement (expensive) remedial actions or blame those who were directly involved in the fact—the scapegoats. Organizations and institutions must learn from failures if they want to avoid repeating them. However, one of the main limits to organizational and institutional learning is addressing systemic problems of an organizational nature with solutions targeting the individual. This approach favors inertia and the creation of ‘organizational scapegoats.’ Pursuing scapegoats without changing the system only ensures that the actors will continue to behave as they did before, and no virtuous learning from the events that have occurred will take place in the organization. The purpose of this book is to systematically understand how and why organizations create scapegoats.”

In my experience, some people become scapegoats more often than others. In patriarchal societies, women may become scapegoats more often than men; in countries with dictatorial setups or those on the path to becoming dictatorships (or what I would call ‘a dictatorship in disguise’—where the power structures of a dictatorship exist without most people realizing it), journalists, bloggers, authors, or others who report the truth of what is going on may also become scapegoats more frequently. Victims who report the abuse they have experienced may experience the same. Often, the scapegoat is actually innocent.

In family systems, people also have different roles. If you were ‘born’ into the role of the scapegoat, you may have been blamed by your family for things that weren’t your fault your whole life.

Maurizio Catino describes the definition of a scapegoat as follows:

“The term scapegoat means, in the ideal-typical formulation, a sort of sacrificial victim, an animate being (man or animal), or even an inanimate object, to which the evils and faults of the community are attributed—evils and faults which the community, through this process of transfer, is able to rid itself of. Another use of the term refers to situations in which an innocent person is punished for wrongful or guilty actions committed by someone else.”

He also mentions a third kind of scapegoat, an individual in an organization, who “pays for faults that also pertain to others.”

While a completely innocent person may be blamed in an organization and have to take on the blame for something they did not do, Maurizio Catino describes another common setting, where the organizational scapegoat is

“the subject who pays for faults that also pertain to others. (…) The organizational scapegoat bears responsibility for the disputed event, but this responsibility is exaggerated by the accusers, who underestimate the context in which the event took place and the role and actions of other agents. In some cases, the scapegoat, for convenience’s sake, consents to assume this role; in others, this consent is not given.”

The creators of the scapegoat are what are called “blamemongers.”

The stages that lead to the creation of a scapegoat in an organization are usually similar.

According to Maurizio Catino, the process usually follows this pattern:

“Typically, the initial stage begins with the manifestation of a negative event (e.g., a crisis, bankruptcy, accident, scandal); next, the organization faces the risk of legal sanctions and severe costs; and finally, there is a stage characterized by the identification of one or more people as scapegoats. This latter move leads to an outcome for the organization, which is generally a positive one, such as avoiding or reducing sanctions, costs, stigma, and negative social evaluations.”

Organizations usually deal with such situations in two ways:

“The first is to admit responsibility for the event and its consequences and implement measures for improvement and change: an organizational and institutional learning strategy. The second is to try to transfer responsibility to people immediately involved in the event—the bad apples. This can involve accusing the latter of negligence in the case of an accident, or of being rogue employees in the case of misconduct. This second strategy produces inertia because by creating a scapegoat, the organization, and the ruling coalition in particular, will be safe: above all, they will not have to implement potentially costly remedial measures. Exemplary punishment of the scapegoat seems to be the solution identified by an organization to overcome a state of crisis.”

Not only individuals can become scapegoats, but groups of people can, too. Think of the Jews before and during the Second World War, as a whole group of people who became the scapegoat of a dictatorial regime—they weren’t actually the ones to blame but had to take on the blame for things they didn’t cause, do, or for which they weren’t otherwise responsible. This is common regarding scapegoats.

Marek Halter, who is Jewish, explains what it feels like to be a scapegoat in his book Why the Jews? The Need to Scapegoat:

Why the Jews

“Whether or not I’m kind to them, anti-Semites reject me simply because I am a Jew.”

Marek Halter describes a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Western Europe in his book:

“Hatred of Jews is showing its face again, everywhere, to staggering degrees. We thought an awareness of the Holocaust would be our greatest stronghold against fanaticism. We were wrong. With the disappearance of witnesses and the erosion of time, tempers are raging, stoked by a joint assault by the propaganda of a few totalitarian states looking for enemies and a tireless mob of negationists, racists, xenophobes, and conspiracy theorists of all kinds on social media—who are helped, it must be said, by the ignorance of the majority of our contemporaries and the passivity of a few who know what is happening but are too afraid to come forward. Seventy-five years after the Second World War and its tens of millions of deaths, seventy-five years after swearing ‘This will never happen again!’ in a unanimous voice, ‘this’ is spilling from our gutters. The situation is most concerning in Western European countries, the part of Europe that fashioned the very notion of the rights of man. In Germany, for example, where until recently the word ‘anti-Semite’ was still unpronounceable because of Nazism, violent acts against Jews increased by 70 percent in 2018 alone.”

In the article The Psychology of Perpetrators and Bystanders by Ervin Staub, the dynamics that lead to a group being scapegoated are explained as follows:

“Why do governments or powerful groups in a society foster genocide, mass murder, and other organized acts of violence against a subgroup? This article explores psychological sources, social (life) conditions, and cultural preconditions that contribute to such actions. Difficult life conditions, a common precursor of mistreatment of a group, create frustration, threat to, and attack on life, ways of life, and self-concept. In their need to deal with the psychological effects of difficult life conditions, people often will scapegoat and turn to ideologies which offer hope but identify some group as an enemy. These and other ways of dealing with the psychological effects of difficult life conditions frequently give rise to violence. Certain characteristics of a culture—such as a belief in cultural superiority (which is threatened by conditions of life), devaluation of, and discrimination against, a group, obedience to authority, and others—make this more likely. Once mistreatment has started, participation or passivity by many members of society makes its continuation more likely.”

Bystander non-intervention is often a problem in scapegoating dynamics. I have experienced bystander non-intervention repeatedly, and I have to say it is one of the most horrific things a person can experience in a life-threatening or other situation where help is urgently needed.

Now, if you would have been killed if you helped a Jewish person during the Second World War, bystander non-intervention may be understandable as a reaction.

But today, it is totally unacceptable, particularly if people aren’t going to be punished when they help and could easily provide assistance. I have repeatedly experienced bystander non-intervention regarding the situation I have found myself in with my children being kept hidden at an unknown address in China, along with people stalking and harassing me or threatening to kill me.

Have you ever been scapegoated?

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