The Publicization of Organizational Misconduct: A Social Structural Approach

Scandals are momentous events with far-reaching consequences for organizations and society, but we still know relatively little about the contextual conditions that enable them. In this paper, we develop and test a theory of the publicization of organizational misconduct—that is, of how an act of wrongdoing by an organization becomes widely publicized, thereby giving rise to a scandal; or receives little coverage, with little or no consequence for the offending organization. We argue that communities have structural features that affect the social cost of making information public as well as its dissemination, shaping the likelihood of organizational misconduct being publicized in the process. We test and find evidence in support of our arguments using data on sex abuse in the U.S. Catholic Church between 1980 and 2010, and exploring the heterogeneity in the publicization of patterns of misconduct by Catholic clergy across dioceses and over time. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the scholarly understanding of organizational misconduct and scandals across settings.