From Paralysis to Publicization: How Victims of the UK Post Office Horizon Scandal Experienced and Confronted Organizational Harm

The publicization of organizational harm is critical for enabling accountability and justice. While existing research offers valuable insights into how audiences label and sanction harm as misconduct, we know comparatively little about the early stages of such publicization – how knowledge of harm first moves from the private sphere to broader outsider awareness. In this study, we address this undertheorized phase in the misconduct literature by examining the UK Post Office Horizon IT scandal, in which over 4,000 subpostmasters were wrongly accused of theft and false accounting over many years due to faults in an IT system. Our analysis reveals how a series of organizational moves produced a state of response paralysis among victims, leaving them unable or unwilling to speak out, thereby stalling publicization. We then show how this paralysis was gradually broken down, enabling victims to take the first steps toward making their experiences public. By foregrounding these early dynamics in the process of publicization, our study offers a more complete understanding of publicization and the broader lifecycle of organizational misconduct. Overall, the study enables scholars to better understand why some organizational harm remains hidden for years, or never comes to light at all.