This paper proposes a novel reading of the spread of practices being championed under the Corporate Social Responsibility banner. Our analysis, building on anthropologist René Girard’s work, is that the trend reflects efforts by globalized capitalist corporations to escape a scapegoating mechanism that could ultimately oust them from society. The starting point is an investigative framework cross-analyzing externality theory with the concept of reciprocal violence as theorized in Girard’s work. We show how negative externalities can trigger cycles of reciprocal violence between firms and their stakeholders. Scapegoating emerges as the last social rampart for regulating system-endemic violence as stakeholders grow increasingly sensitive to the externalities that threaten to overwhelm contemporary governance mechanisms.
