Why Scandals Don't Happen

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Julien Jourdan is a professor in the Management and Human Resources Department at HEC Paris. He studies organizational scandal: not the explosion, but the long silence that precedes it. His research, conducted with Alessandro Piazza at Rice University, grew out of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis in the United States. The question that drives his work: how misconduct can persist for decades without ever becoming a scandal.It turns out that in most cases, the information was already available. People knew about misconduct but didn’t speak out. Information stayed local, circulated as rumor, and never reached the threshold where it became public outrage. Julien identifies three structural reasons for this: the social cost of speaking against your own community, the absence of bridging ties that would carry information beyond closed networks, and the sheer power of the institution accused.This conversation isn’t about the Church per se, though. Julien has spoken about other scandals like Wirecard, here. We also talked about the Epstein case, a scandal that has been “happening” for over twenty years and still isn’t fully resolved. And we talked about political polarization: the possibility that in a society fractured into tribes with no shared moral framework, scandal becomes structurally impossible. Not because misconduct is hidden, but because outrage can no longer coalesce.Food for thought on a topic that we are unlikely to exhaust anytime soon.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe