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"scapegoat"
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Sémanalyse d’une figure iconique : héroïsme et mythologie identitaire dans les stratégies discursives de Kémi Séba (2017)
The article explores the dynamic interplay of heroism and “mythological identity” within the rhetorical strategies employed by pan-Africanist leader Kémi Séba. Using a semiotic framework, the study analyses Seba’s discourses, focusing on the iconic act of burning a CFA Franc banknote as an act of civil disobedience. It examines how Seba’s language embodies extremist characteristics while fostering a collective African identity against neo-colonial oppression. The analysis highlights how his mythopoetic creativity not only challenges external economic and political structures but also mobilizes emotional and symbolic resources to reconstruct and empower a unified African community. This research sheds light on the broader implications of language as a tool for political resistance and identity formation within contemporary francophone African contexts.
Journal Article
Scapegoats, Hate, and the Challenge of Empathy
Remarkably, even those people who profess to follow a religion with beliefs that all people are created in the image of their god experience hate that degrades or eliminates their ability to empathize with the group of people who are being scapegoated. What facilitates their acceptance of such negative stereotypical narratives about entire groups of people? Andrew A. Nierenberg, MD, holds the Thomas P. Hackett, MD, Endowed Chair in Psychiatry at MGH, and is the Director of the Dauten Family Center for Bipolar Treatment Innovation and Co-Director of the Center for Clinical Research Education, Division of Clinical Research, Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Journal Article
Just war theory and scapegoat mechanism: An analysis of
This article examined Augustine’s just war theory through René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, as posited in his theory of mimetic desire. Augustine, in his development of just war theory, adopted a realist approach to justify the ethical criteria for judging the morality of conflict. Just war theory, in its historical form, interpreted as a positive rule of action based on just war principles that were developed over time. Therefore, through a comparative approach, this article argued the rationality of modern warfare and violence on the notion of the surrogate victim, which is necessary for social order and the formulation of cultures, as posited by Girard. In his corpus, Girard highlights the role of scapegoating and victimisation in the process of unifying a community. Thus, a comparative analysis of just war theory and the scapegoat mechanism can be developed to study the conditions for peace, religious liberty and social cohesion. This article discusses the following points: (1) the modern relevance of just war principles; (2) the effects of scapegoat mechanisms in modern societies and their impact on social order and political discourse; and (3) the role of missio Dei in the context of warfare and violence.ContributionThis article contributes to a comprehensive study of moral philosophy through the thoughts of Augustine and Girard. The convergence between violence, war, peace and justice is studied through anthropology and religious cultural lens. Arguably, this process has the potential to develop an empirical framework to study war and violence acts in our modern polarised world. Furthermore, it considers the ideal praxis for missio Dei in the context of social order and the common good in the 21st century.
Journal Article
Escaping the Scapegoat Trap: Using René Girard’s Framework for Workplace Bullying
This study aims at developing a theoretical model for workplace bullying using René Girard’s scapegoating framework. Despite the wide range of labels and related constructs present in workplace bullying literature, the explanation of the phenomenon is often studied under theoretical frameworks that do not always capture the nature of the concept. Indeed, the need to find instruments and tools to reduce or solve workplace bullying overshadowed conceptual and theoretical matters, leaving the concept undertheorized. By broadening the spectrum of social sciences beyond managerial and organizational studies, we propose to use René Girard’s scapegoating framework to shed new light on workplace bullying. The scapegoating framework allows us to understand better some collective and social dimensions of workplace bullying, catching relevant elements that characterize this phenomenon, also those that are less evident from organizational studies. In a Girardian sense, scapegoating is like a trap that every human society falls into, and many aspects of workplace bullying recall its mechanism. For Girard, a human group or society can fall into a spiral of reciprocal violence because of the mimetic desire mechanism, risking a conflict escalation: violence begets more violence, putting at risk the stability or even the existence of this group or society. Scapegoating is a way to overcome reciprocal violence by uniting against a single victim who cannot reciprocate this violence. This study also proposes a tentative way to escape this trap: positive mimesis and gift-giving.
Journal Article
Drug Addiction: Failure, Feast and Phoenix
This article offers a unique interdisciplinary theoretical examination of the stigmatisation of ‘drug addicts’ and its impacts on health and wellbeing. In the present conjuncture, drug addiction has become a metaphor for a ‘wasted’ life. The stigmatisation of addicts creates artificial monsters. They constitute matter out of place—addiction is dirt and the addict a form of symbolic pollution—as their excessive consumption means they are ostracised and branded as failures. Providing a tripartite framework—of failure, feast, and phoenix—this article will suggest that addiction occupies a contradictory social and conceptual space, at once cause, effect, and solution. It is in this context that the stigmatisation of addiction operates, despite the fact addicts constitute a consumer par excellence, solicited by the very system that seeks to punish, control, and cure them. Drawing on Girard’s generative scapegoat alongside the philosophical concept of the Muselmann, which parallels it, this paper will examine the hypocritical and contradictory portrayal, consumption and treatment of addiction; the social harm and stigmatisation arising from this portrayal; the systems of power and privilege that reproduce this; and how these systematically affect not only the health and wellbeing of addicts, but also their medical care and treatment. The health impacts arising from this framework will illustrate how scapegoating can lead to worsening mental and physical health, social isolation, and create barriers to treatment, which ultimately perpetuate the cycle of addiction that create public health challenges (e.g., drug-related deaths). The ensuing discussion will show how the addict is a symptom of capitalism and colonialism before it, sustaining it as well as serving as a convenient distraction from the systematic problems and illustrating the brutal realities of biopolitical power and its inherent contradictions. Only by understanding the broader socio-cultural and political implications of addiction within the context of late capitalism can we start to reduce stigma and scapegoating and focus on addiction as a medical issue rather than a moral and/or criminal one; a key to improving health outcomes.
Journal Article
Physical Violence and Scapegoating Within the Family: An Exploration of Biblical Texts and Contemporary Psychology
To understand physical violence in the family, it is important to define the role of the victim. The term “scapegoat” is a universal anthropological concept, often used in sociological theories, where a certain group of people and/or minorities are often victimized or blamed (e.g., social ills). We may note that the phenomenon of scapegoating is most clearly expressed in the Bible. Therefore, we will use relevant biblical texts that refer to parental use of corporal punishment in which a child is scapegoated and/or victimized by parental violence. In this sense, the Bible is the most profound explanation and manifestation of the cultural, social, and especially religious development of humanity. At the same time, the concept of scapegoating is also demonstrated in psychology and therapy, where it also serves as a basis for understanding, for example, physical violence in the family, and where it is also crucial to define the role of the victim. In this article, therefore, we will explain the biblical background of this concept and highlight two basic dynamics of violence against children in the family: when the child is the “scapegoat” for unresolved tensions in the family and when the child becomes the “sacrifice” or victim of the dysregulated emotional response of his or her parents.
Journal Article
Shifting Blame? Experimental Evidence of Delegating Communication
Decision makers frequently have a spokesperson communicate their decisions. In this paper, we address two questions. First, does it matter
who
communicates an unfair decision? Second, does it matter
how
the unfair decision is communicated? We conduct a modified dictator game experiment in which either the decision maker or a spokesperson communicates the decided allocation to recipients, who then determine whether to punish either of them. We find that receivers punish both the decision maker and the spokesperson more often, and more heavily, for unfair allocations communicated by the spokesperson if there is room for shifting blame. The increased punishment results from the messenger’s style of delivery: spokespersons are more likely than decision makers to express emotional regret instead of rational need. Receivers seem to punish the former style of communication because they view it as an attempt to shift blame. Our results establish more generally that the design of communication schemes shapes relationships among organizational members.
Data and the online appendix are available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2782
.
This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Journal Article
Shedding light on the CMO revolving door: a study of the antecedents of Chief Marketing Officer turnover
Investigating Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) tenure through a longitudinal study of the antecedents of CMO turnover, the authors find that CMO turnover increases if firms’ sales growth is poor, while profitability has a similar though smaller effect when a new CEO is appointed, highlighting marketing’s contextual role vis-à-vis performance metrics. Coupled with other results related to industry sales growth and stability that make CMO turnover less likely, these findings underscore marketing’s demand- or customer-facing role in the firm. The authors also show that some of these results are distinct to turnover among CMOs compared to other top management team (TMT) executives. While this research does show support for extant theory, its focus on the CMO within the TMT results in important contributions to the turnover literature. These include the inverted-U effect of TMT marketing experience on CMO turnover and the nuanced attenuation by CMO insider-ness of a similar relationship between CMO tenure and turnover. Overall, the results lead to important practical implications for managing CMO turnover.
Journal Article