Unveiling the Scapegoat: A Girardian Reading of Disability and Organizational Discrimination

Abstract

This study introduces a critical lens to explore discriminatory dynamics towards people with disabilities in organizational contexts, using René Girard’s scapegoating framework. Despite the wide range of labels that attempt to define disability, the literature would benefit from a more nuanced approach and dynamic model. This model could explain how an ableist organizational environment can give rise to various forms of violence towards people with disability. By broadening the spectrum of social sciences beyond managerial and organizational studies and overlapping the identification processes in an ableist organization with René Girard’s scapegoating framework, this study tries to obtain a more nuanced and dynamic perspective. Indeed, the scapegoating framework allows us to better understand the collective and social dimensions and processes of discriminatory behaviors, capturing relevant elements that characterize the phenomenon. This informs ongoing research into new evaluative tools and sketches new theoretical and empirical approaches.