Since the much-publicized Nike scandal of 1997 concerning working conditions in the sweatshops of Indonesia, several similar cases have hit the headlines – for example, Total in Burma and (more recently) the Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh. Each time, these corporate scandals feature asymmetric struggles between giant corporations and fringe stakeholders – workers, local residents and communities – the very existence of whom the scandal reveals. Many authors suggest that these corporate scandals are an essential part of the current phase of globalization. However they have received little attention in the two developing theoretical frameworks that propose to explain the relationships between multi-national corporations (MNCs) operating in emergent countries and their fringe stakeholders: the research streams of stakeholder politics and political corporate social responsibility (political CSR). Our objective in this article is to investigate the role played by corporate scandals and scapegoating processes for counterbalancing, at least for a while, the asymmetric relationship between MNCs and fringe stakeholders. The ideas of the anthropologist René Girard occupy a central place in our reasoning. We follow Girard’s thoughts, which emphasize that scapegoating processes explain how conflicts may be regulated when political institutions and cultural systems are weak and encounter difficulties in mediating conflicting relationships. We view scandals, media lynchings and corporate scapegoats as essential elements in political processes between MNCs and their fringe stakeholders. Our contributions for organizational scholars are threefold. First, we contribute to the perspectives of stakeholder politics and political CSR by revealing the processes through which publicized scapegoating helps catalyse collective action between an MNC and its fringe stakeholders. We identify three main processes: convergence on a single corporate target, publicization of deviant behaviour, and organizational contagion. Our second contribution concerns the moderation of the agentic vision proposed by stakeholder politics and political CSR. We argue that the emergence of fringe stakeholders on the agendas of MNCs hinges on complex processes comprising strategic actions and spontaneous unanticipated organizational dynamics. Lastly, we delineate future works for organizational scholars working on political CSR by highlighting the importance of organizing public spaces for dialogue and deliberation.
