Just Because You Are Different: Understanding the Treatment of People with Disabilities in Organizations Through the Scapegoating Framework

The study aims at developing a theoretical model to understand discriminatory behaviors directed toward people with disabilities in organizational contexts by using René Girard’s scapegoating framework. Despite the wide range of labels that try to define disability and theories that explain discriminant behaviors, the literature suffers from an ableist prejudice and lacks an explanation of mechanisms that underlie the rise of different inclusion paths in organizations. Indeed, the need to find instruments and tools to reduce or solve discrimination overshadowed conceptual and theoretical matters. 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 the phenomenon. The scapegoating framework allows us to fully understand the collective and social dimensions of discriminatory behaviors, catching all the relevant elements that characterize this phenomenon, even those that are less evident from organizational studies. The scapegoating mechanism, in a Girardian sense, is like a trap that every human society falls into, and discrimination against disabled people is just a clear exemplification of this 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. Starting from the analysis of the four stereotypes of Girard’s framework, this study shows that it is possible to imagine a way to escape the scapegoating trap by shaping organizational identity and using strategies for inclusion. Indeed, it is possible to decline the managerial practices related to the construction of the organizational identity around the four stereotypes avoiding the trap of scapegoat.