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Big Data draws both praise and criticism, seen as both villain and hero. The release of megabytes of data by Wikileaks is accorded praise as information transparency by some, whilst others find the massive collection of information by Amazon or Google, often freely given, immoral and to be feared. The paper examines three cases embracing the velocity, volume and variety aspects of Big Data – digital platforms, driverless cars and the Banking Royal Commission – and uses René Girard’s theories of mimesis and scapegoating to show that the identification of a scapegoat, or villain, is a common feature in them and that concerns over Big Data are linked to fear of ‘the other’, thus helping to show how Big Data can be both loved and hated and how both practitioners and theorists might comprehend public reaction to big data and its ethical dimensions.

This paper aims to better understand why neoliberal governance is so resilient to the crises that frequently affect all or part of the economy.

The argument of this paper relies on a macroanalysis of discourses surrounding the Global Financial Crisis.

Drawing on Girard and Foucault’s work, this paper argues that the resilience of neoliberalism partly ensues from the proclivity of this mode of governing to foster, for reasons that this paper seeks to highlight, spontaneous and widespread processes of scapegoating in times of turmoil. As a consequence of these processes, crises often are collectively construed as resulting from frauds: the blame is focused on specific actors whose lack of morality is denounced, and this individualizing line of interpretation protects the regime from systemic questioning.

Particular actors, rather than the system itself, are made accountable when things go wrong. Consequences are paramount. Today’s political economy is characterized with a proclivity toward social reproduction. While substantive change is possible in theory, considerable challenges are involved in practice in overcoming the dominance of neoliberalism in society.

Although Girard’s work has exerted significant influence over a number of disciplines in the social sciences, his ideas have not yet been widely used in governance and accountability-related research. Anthropological theorizations – such as those proposed by Girard – are valuable in providing us with a sense of how power develops in the economy.

This chapter evaluates the allure and the danger of attributing race-laden crime politics to displaced anxiety. Stuart Scheingold's “myth of crime and punishment” was a path-setting theory of redirected fear, arguing that socioeconomic “fear of falling” is displaced onto street crime, where the simple morality tale of lawbreaker-versus-state offers the illusion of control. The danger of this theory, I argue, is that it purports to analyze post-1960s’ structural inequality, but it replicates the post-civil rights logic and language of racism as nonstructural – an irrationality, a misplaced emotion, a mere epiphenomenon of class. As a theory that hinges on the malfunction of redirecting structural anxieties onto symbols and scapegoats, the vocabulary of displaced anxieties links punitive (white) subjects to punished (black and Latino) objects through a diagnosis that is, by definition, beyond rationality. The vocabulary of displaced anxiety categorizes the racial politics of law and order as an emotional misfire, thereby occluding the ways in which racial interests are at stake in crime policy and carceral state development.

Scandal is the disruptive publicity of alleged misconduct and it is important for organizations because of its severe consequences. Distinguishing between single-actor scandals, i.e., scandals that result from publicity of misconduct by a single actor, and multiple-actor scandals, i.e., scandals that result from publicity of misconduct of a similar type by multiple actors, we develop a framework for studying scandal dynamics that draws a distinction between how scandals start (single-actor or multiple-actor) and how they end (single-actor or multiple-actor). We focus specifically on spillover scandals (from single to multiple actors) and scapegoating scandals (from multiple to single actors) and identify several mechanisms that affect the likelihood of these two important types of scandals. We conclude by developing a research agenda that builds upon the central contribution of our framework: the distinction between single- and multiple-organization scandals and the transitions that result in spillovers and scapegoating.

The theory of autopoietic social systems (Luhmann) is used as an explanatory framework for such historico‐sociological puzzles as the origins of social crisis, totalitarianism, the appearance of the crowd, the mass extermination of internal enemies (scapegoats), and the modern emergence of sociology itself. All of these seemingly incompatible phenomena have a connection with one particular emotion, namely, alienation, which is utilized as an integrative concept. On the basis of an elaboration of the concept of systems medium, social crisis is analysed as being solicited by a reduced availability of whatever systemic medium is most important in a given society.