Victim, villain, or scapegoat? Mediating organizational crises embedded in social problems and the transformation of order

ABSTRACT Western crisis communication theories focusing on individual attribution and stable underlying norms fail to account for crises embedded in larger social problems that lead to regulatory changes. By analysing three cases that Chinese crisis managers initially identified as “commission”, “control” and “agreement” situations (Bradford & Garrett, 1995) but ended up as crises involving “absent standards”, “bad standards” and “overrated standards”, in which the first two resulted in normative changes, we highlight the deliberative potential of crisis communication embodied in the “standards situation”. When neither journalistic narratives portraying the accused as a “villain” nor organizational accounts foregrounding a “victim/scapegoat” self-perception can contain attribution at individual levels, the society enters a deliberative mode that interrogates actors’ collective guilt complicit in a crisis.