Seminar – From paralysis to publicisation: How victims of the post office horizon scandal experienced and confronted organisational harm

Organisations frequently inflict harm on individuals, yet it remains unclear why such harm often takes years to come to light. While research has looked extensively at the role of external audiences, like the media, in the publicisation of organisational harm, a key actor that has been overlooked is victims themselves. Using archival data, media accounts, and interviews, we examine the UK Post Office Horizon Scandal case, where over 4,000 post office branch managers were accused of theft and false accounting, based on losses that were later understood to be caused by a faulty IT system. Despite the scale of this harm, public knowledge and attention towards it took 14 years to emerge. Our findings reveal how victims experienced a response paralysis (made up of isolation-based, doubt-based, shame-based, and despair-based paralysis) that discouraged them from speaking out, and then describes how victims came to chip away at their paralysis to break their silence. Overall, we extend existing literature on the process by which organisational wrongdoing is publicised and may take years to come to light by providing insights into how knowledge of harm inside organisations can face barriers in making its way to the public sphere.

Room M4.02