My first blog is about a relationship between Revenge and Scapegoat, both terms are a sociological concept.
Recently I have read The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely. The story of vengeance is introduced the chapter 5 of the book. Especially, I was interested in an experiment of Agents and Principals in the chapter. For instance, when we go to a restaurant, our waitress give us a bad customer service such as spending a lot of time until serving a food. And then, we want to take revenge to her through tipping her a bit less or writing the complaint of the restaurant over the Internet. To decrease the size of tip is vengeance on her, while revenge by using Word-of-mouth is not only for her whom the agent is usually, but also for the restaurant whom the principal is. According to study by Ariely and co-researchers, we tend to seek revenge not to depend on whether the agent or the principal when we want the someone to feel the desire for revenge because they did something to make us get angry.
Next, I will talk about Scapegoat. Seattle Mariners dismissed Don Wakamatsu, manager, due to be miserable team performance, even though some researches show that changing manager during the season is negatively related or not correlated with improving the team performance. Such firing is called Scapegoating in the field of succession study, which deals with how manager or CEO takes over in an organization and a company, and how managerial succession influences on firms. Also, Scapegoating is more likely to be manegers or executives who have less power than more powerful them, according to Boeker (1992). In the case of Mariners, the General Manager who is the principal did not quit, despite a responsibility of the struggling as well as Wakamatsu who is the agent.
Introduced two topics share a common point. It is that we are bad at grasping a causal relationship, and also we prefer passing a blame on to the other people. Accordingly, we often take revenge and scapegoat, which are, I suspect, an instinctive behavior.
Finally, I am going to introduce an example that both revenge and scapegoat are related. Mr. Nozoe, former President of Fujitsu Limited (Fujitsu), was dismissed on September 25, 2009 because of connected with a third-party company that was said to have an unfavorable reputation. In this time, Mr. Nozoe agreed with accepting to be fired, according to a board member of Fujitsu. But, on March 6, 2010 Mr. Nozoe sent a letter about requesting his resignation be nullified to Fujitsu, and then a relationship between him and the company was very threatening. He was about to sue the company for libel, and so far he haven't had a regal fight to them. I think he was scapegoat for a responsibility of having a relationship to a unfavorable company and carrying out too drastic reforms. However, the reason for being dismissed is still unclear. Also, Mr. Nozoe took a revenge to the company by a big report. For this, Fujitsu received to decline a reputation and pay a cost to work out. I still don't know which Mr. Nozoe or Fujitsu said a true thing, and he needed to disclose the issue because of this revenge to the company who is the principal instead of the board members who are the agent. But, Mr. Nozoe seemed to me to be the villain through the series of reports. Which do you think that Mr. Nozoe or Fujitsu is the villain?
