When organizations engage in misconduct, they are subject to a variety of evaluations and actions from stakeholders. Yet research on organizational misconduct overlooks the concept of blame, and this is unfortunate because blame is an evaluation that animates important stakeholder reactions such as boycotts, stock market slumps, and others. We synthesize insights from philosophy, psychology, and corporate law to introduce the concept of organizational blame, which is a stakeholder evaluation resulting from a firm engaging in an act that violates a moral norm and is socially undesirable. We then develop a theoretical model for how stakeholders make blame assessments of organizations.
