Navigating Between the Plots: A Narratological and Ethical Analysis of Business-Related Conspiracy Theories (BrCTs)

Compared with utilitarians and deontologists, virtue ethicists emphasize (among others) the critical role of individual character traits in choosing ethical actions. This means that doing good can depend on universal rules and codes that are imposed on us but also, in large part, on our individual and natural tendencies, which can be positive or negative and are influenced by the environment (MacIntyre 1981). While some Aristotelian ethicists see business as merely satisfying a desire for maximizing profit, which can prevent agents from living the good life (MacIntyre 1981), others believe that companies can be viewed as creators of opportunity to form communities with a moral responsibility and a commitment to doing good (Hartman 2011; Moore 1999; Solomon 2003). In the latter scenario, a business is considered a community of practice² whose virtuosity flows in part from managers who are devoted to excellence and focus on “those internal goods thereby obtainable, while warding off threats from […][the] inordinate pursuit of external goods and from the corrupting power of those other institutions with which it engages” (Moore 2005, p. 661). Noting the almost impossible task of developing purely Aristotelian business communities built on honesty, dependability, or equality, Sinnicks (2019a) suggests that business communities should be developed while maintaining a suspicion of inequality within the community, having minimal displays of unequal power, and putting an emphasis on face-to-face interactions and relatively equal pay.

Belief in a BrCT challenges many of the assumptions about the virtuous tendency of business agents and communities. By definition, BrCTs recount the story of egoistic agents who conspire at the expense of another group of people. BrCTs represent a lack (or absence) of integrity, fairness, trust, and empathy in business, that is, a lack (or absence) of a majority of core virtues required in a business context, whether at an individual or an organizational level (Chun 2005; Murphy 1999; Shanahan and Hyman 2003). In short, BrCTs depict a business world that has seriously failed to develop Aristotelian virtue in business agents and organizations. By depicting the business world as unethical because of agents’ personal interests, BrCTs make the absence of virtue ethics an ordinary and pervasive fact of capitalism and market economies. The possible consequences of such a view are a generalized distrust of business agents and organizations, a related lack of belief in CSR and other ethical engagements, and, eventually, the end of deontological and utilitarian act theories. People who believe in BrCTs are likely to react by reinforcing their feelings of distrust and considering CSR and other ethical engagement as a veil to hide the truth about what business really is.

Aristotle (2009) argues that practical wisdom requires virtue. Practical wisdom is a master virtue and is people’s capacity to act on knowledge of what is good or bad (Aristotle 2009). Apart from a general conception of what is good or bad, practical wisdom involves the ability to deliberate well and to act on that deliberation. In light of Aristotle’s practical wisdom, the perceived lack of virtue in business agents and organizations, as well as the belief in BrCTs, would create the appropriate context for the development of negative character traits in agents who might eventually end up with unwise practices. Regarding BrCTs, unwise practices would mean an inability to make informed and rational judgments and would lead to stronger conspiracy ideation and/or unethical practices. The relationship between unwise practices, considered to be altered thinking dispositions, and conspiracy ideation has already been investigated and empirically tested in cognitive psychology. For instance, Swami et al. (2014) show that analytical thinking reduces belief in conspiracy theories. Regarding the vaccine example provided in the introduction, conspiracists who refuse to have their children vaccinated or firmly deny the reality of climate change are likely to display unwise practices in part because of a lack of trust resulting from the perceived lack of virtues in business agents and organizations. Similarly, unethical behavior from agents within organizations would also result from perceptions of an unethical business environment that encourages people to act accordingly.

Context is crucial for the development of positive/negative character traits and virtues/vices (Aristotle 2009; MacIntyre 1981). In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith (2003) was already warning against nefarious but necessary mercantilism and the fact that merchants are likely to come together to conspire against the public. Secrecy is also a tradition of capitalism, with some companies having great power and nurturing this culture of secrecy (De Maria 2006). Interestingly, one just has to look at some of the articles published lately in the Journal of Business Ethics to understand today’s business environment: Corporations can cause harm; therefore, trust is ever more critical in this age of surveillance capitalism when ethical conduct requires a struggle (Alcadipani and de Oliveira Medeiros 2019; Andrew and Baker 2019; Kaptein 2017; Levine 2019). Like the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries that illustrate the late 20th- and early 21st-century lobbying traditions, some industries have often been accused and sometimes found guilty of conspiring against the law (Brandt 2009; HAI and CEO 2012). Similarly, some industries or companies have subsidized medical organizations and research centers that seemingly prove the regular and high consumption of salt, sugar, or red meat, for example, is not harmful to consumer health (Jacobson 2005; Kearns, Schmidt, and Glantz 2016).

In such a context, Fleming and Jones (2013) argue that CSR is partly an instance of propaganda that misses the forest for the trees. While companies display their ethical labels and CSR projects, consumers learn about the emissions scandal in the automotive industry (e.g., the Volkswagen Group), horse meat that is intentionally and secretly added to frozen food to replace beef (e.g., the 2013 horse meat scandal), printer cartridges that run out of ink unusually quickly (Risley 2015), or carbon emissions trading that contributes to new modes of accumulation and ultimately prevents our world from achieving structural change and new capitalist dynamics that could reduce emissions (Böhm et al. 2012). All these gaps between what Tamminen (1992) calls espoused ethics and ethics in use can only increase perceptions of a lack of virtue in business, which is already high (Cole and Smith 1996). But they can also nurture conspiracy thinking about brands, marketing, and the overall business environment being visible outputs of politico-economic imperialism designed by malevolent entities.

Apart from failures in CSR projects and the economic system in general, it is the context of the context of business that may lead to the perceived lack of virtue. Consumer culture and marketing have commodified conspiracy thinking. One example is the main airport in Denver, which recently installed a talking gargoyle that says, “Welcome to the Illuminati Headquarters, I mean, Denver International Airport.” Another example is the renaming of a Spanish third division football club near Madrid as Club Flat Earth F.C., or the 2015 New York Art, Antique and Jewelry Show, where a collection of items relating to the JFK assassination, including one of the seven copies of the Zapruder film, was priced at $168,500. More broadly, people indulge in “a self-conscious and self-reflexive entertainment culture of conspiracy” by consuming movies, series, video games, and books such as The Matrix, The X-Files, 24, Assassin’s Creed, Conspiracy Theory, and The Da Vinci Code (Knight 2002, p. 6). These cultural works, mediated by consumer society, infuse popular culture with the notions of secrecy and doubt, as if to suggest that social reality might well be an illusion that allows secret decisions made by a few powerful people to remain concealed (Bell and Bennion-Nixon 2000; Kellner 2002). In addition, the success of critical theory in the twentieth century would have helped spread and legitimize conspiracy thinking in our Western cultures (Latour 2004). Authors like Baudrillard (1981), Deleuze (1990), and Foucault (1975) formulated their suspicions and opinions about hegemonic entities manipulating and enslaving the masses, regardless of whether these entities are countries (mainly the US), banks, companies, or more intangible forms like consumer society. In their own ways, all these authors perpetuated what Ricoeur (1965) calls a hermeneutics of suspicion, which we already find in Schopenhauer (1818) and later in Nietzsche (1878). Today, this logic of suspicion has become intertwined with the vox populi and is particularly visible in emerging terms (e.g., alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth) that indicate concerns about what the truth is (Baird and Calvard 2019).

Originally coined in the fields of nursing ethics and health care, ethical distress is defined as uncomfortable feelings and a psychological imbalance of being in a situation in which one knows what is the right thing to do but unlikely to happen for various reasons (Jameton 1984; Corley 2002). From an Aristotelian perspective, ethical distress can be understood as a hindrance to living according to our virtues. For instance, Aristotle (2009) worries about the possibility that akrasia (i.e., weakness of will) takes people away from virtue since they would act in a way that is contrary to their choice. In business ethics, ethical distress has been observed in employee/manager relationships (Prottas 2013) or in the case of a dissonance between an organization’s operational values and what this same organization says it endorses (Mills and Werhane 2015). In the context of BrCTs, ethical distress would appear after that individuals perceive a lack of virtue in business with no official voice publicly banning unethical practices resulting from this lack of virtue, or observe that nothing changes despite official discourses. Another possible contributor to ethical distress is CSR itself, for it shows the way to make business more virtuous while simultaneously reminding us that this path paved with good intentions is not the one systematically taken by agents—not because of a lack of means but because of a lack or a weakness of will. This feeling that business does not act according to our values and principles and that nothing is going to change for the better could trigger ethical distress and lead some to believe that this absence of change is the result of a conspiracy and powerful people that they should blame or fight. In this context, believing in BrCTs would be a coping strategy to release the tensions created by ethical distress in a similar way to how nurses use various strategies to cope with ethical distress (Corley 2002).

A possible consequence of ethical distress, and possibly a mediator variable between ethical distress and BrCT belief, is ethical blindness. It has been well studied that aversive states like anxiety (i.e., a state closely associated with ethical distress) result in maladaptive behavior due to altered cognitive capacity and a focus on negative or possibly negative events (Kessler et al. 2009). Palazzo et al. (2012) propose that everyone can experience ethical blindness, that is, a temporary and unconscious deviation from our values and principles, whatever they are. According to them, ethical blindness is more likely to arise in a situation of rigid framing (i.e., rigid mental structures used to simplify and understand reality). While these authors suggest that moral imagination should be developed to promote more flexible framing, it should be noted that a BrCT is the product of moral and immoral imagination—which seems to run counter to Palazzo et al. (2012) original idea. To overcome this issue, I draw on the Aristotelian notion of virtue as an equilibrium and propose that ethical blindness is not only a temporary and unconscious deviation from our own values and principles, but also too great a (temporary and unconscious) focus on our own values and principles (i.e., rigid framing) that eventually makes us deviate from virtue ethics. This can be the case, for instance, when we lack practical wisdom and think we are doing the right thing but, actually, are not doing it the right way. In the context of this research, a BrCT is therefore understood as partly the result of an imagination that always finds inspiration in the same frame of reference. Like Palazzo et al. (2012), I call this phenomenon ethical blindness, in the sense that conspiracists would focus only on the frame offered by the BrCT, since this frame confirms their perception of a failure of virtue ethics in business and helps them structure their thoughts as it provides meaning to a complex reality (Dean 1998; Fenster 1999; Melley 2000). This proposition echoes the work of Swami et al. (2014), who show that conspiracy ideation is not only explained by low analytic thinking but also by low open-mindedness. The occurrence of ethical blindness in the context of BrCTs also finds support in literature, which emphasizes that conspiracy thinking systematically rejects established sources of knowledge (Hardwig 1991) and necessarily relies on the magical “notion that everything is or can be connected” (Dean 2002, p. 97). In the same vein, once people start believing a conspiracy, it becomes almost impossible to persuade them that the conspiracy is unfounded and should not be believed (Nyhan et al. 2013; Sunstein and Vermeule 2009).

To summarize this theoretical frame, BrCTs can be understood as a result of both actual unethical behavior in business and a perceived lack of virtue. The consequences of their belief are a general distrust of business and specific corporations, which potentially leads to unethical behavior. Regarding the reasons why people would move from a perceived lack of virtue in business to belief in BrCTs, I have suggested that the perceived lack of virtue may trigger ethical distress and blindness: Ethical distress would lead to an unwise practice of knowledge (i.e., altered cognitive capacity), which would lead to ethical blindness (i.e., sticking to rigid framing).

Simply put, narratology is “la science du récit,” that is, the science of narratives (Todorov 1969, p. 10). Narratology “examines what all narratives have in common—narratively speaking—and what enables them to be narratively different” (Prince 1982, p. 181–182). It studies the story, which is understood as a sequence of actions or events, and/or the discourse, which corresponds to the way the story is presented (Culler 2001; Genette 1980; Greimas 1997). In this sense, narratology is not a methodology, but a discipline with structuralism and semiotics as two interrelated approaches that are particularly well suited to narratology. The interest of studying narratives lies in their power to reveal how people make sense of their self, their environment, and the relation between the two (MacIntyre 1981). Narratology studies not only narratives but also how people are influenced by them through perception and action. In the context of business, marketplaces and organizations represent arenas of deliberation—sites of symbolic creation and contestation that rely on narratives drawn from cultural traditions (Boje 1991; Ger and Belk 1996; Goulding et al. 2009). By studying narratives found in these arenas, it is possible to understand how agents make sense of their environment and how/where they situate themselves in this environment.

Within narratology, narrative ethics is interested in the intersections between stories and storytelling, on the one hand, and ethical values, on the other hand (Adams 2008). In his attempt to understand what influences the development of virtues and vices, Aristotle (2009) considers that narratives have such a capacity because narratives always include ethical matters, whether deliberately or not (Phelan 2014). Therefore, this paper borrows from narratology and especially from narrative ethics, as I suggest that BrCTs propose narratives of a failure of virtue ethics in the business world. In other words, BrCTs are narrative manifestations of the ethical contestation and deliberation that take place within marketplaces and organizations, and whose characters and storylines can be studied with the help of narratology.

The data was collected online between September 2016 and January 2018 (i.e., three full weeks, followed by one full day every 1.5 weeks on average). The main reason for studying online BrCTs is that the Internet has produced a highly decentralized form of mass communication that perverts the public discourse and helps BrCTs proliferate. In Sunstein’s (2009, pp. 82–83) words, “the Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns, congregate into social networks.” The result is the multiplication of knowledge claims that run counter to mainstream beliefs and that claimants consider as being verified, that is, on the same level of truth as other knowledge provided by officials or science, for example (Barkun 2003).

In total, 28 conspiracy theories co-produced by the media outlets and the readers who discuss the content were analyzed. These conspiracy theories, presented in Table 1, can be seen as what van Dijk (1980) calls semantic macrostructures, that is, the coherent overall meaning generated by the aggregation and organization of different chunks of meaning. In the context of this research, these chunks of meaning are the different data gathered from different online sources: English- or French-language conspiracy websites, blogs, forums, videos,³ seven debunking websites, national and regional newspapers and magazines, and brand/corporate websites that have pages dedicated to the fake information or conspiracy cases in which they are involved (e.g., Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Whole Foods Market, Volkswagen, etc.). In terms of traffic, the conspiracy websites visited for this research receive on average⁴ between 14,000 and more than 14 million monthly visits. Since its inception, the conspiracy website and forum Abovetopsecret says it has generated more than 19 million posts and more than 1 million topics, with 75% of these topics getting replies. While all these figures are already enough to understand to degree to which people have easy and direct access to potentially harmful theories, it is important to note that all these theories are also shared on the most visited websites in the world: through videos on YouTube (second-most visited website in the world) and through posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit (respectively #3, #6, and #13) or Amazon through books (#4).

When dealing with online data collection, Markham (2003, pp. 53–54) reminds us that one “must read the text and interactions of interests, much like trail signs, and make defensible decisions about which paths to follow […] and therefore which boundaries to draw.” She adds that these boundaries would be better if derived from the context than a priori guides and criteria (Markham 2003). In line with her guidelines, the data was collected according to three criteria chosen after the first round of observation: the type of perpetrator (e.g., company, brand, industry, government, association, consumers, etc.), the type of victim (e.g., children, consumers, companies, company, brand, industry, government, the planet, etc.), and the integrative theme of these narratives (i.e., control, rebellion, deception, or a combination of them). These three criteria were the result of preliminary analysis objectives that consisted of determining the semantic macrostructures, as well as the key elements that structure them. As we can see, these three criteria are close to some of the most critical “ingredients” for a narrative to exist in narratology: characters and their functions, as well as the object guiding their actions (Greimas 1983).

One of the problems encountered during data collection is that the information posted on the websites is not always false or necessarily related to a CT. In fact, these websites often mix reliable and unreliable information. Therefore, to decide whether the narrative was a CT, I considered (1) the source (i.e., website listed as conspiracist or not, according to a list provided by debunking blogs or the national French media), (2) whether it was explicitly mentioned that it was a CT—for instance, when narratives were found in local or national newspapers, (3) whether the narrative fit the proposed definition of a BrCT, and finally, (4) whether conspiratorial rhetoric was used. Rhetorical elements include evidence (i.e., proof is all around and should not be questioned), emotion (i.e., one should be afraid of conspirators and be aware of how damaging conspiracies are to humanity, the planet, etc.), belonging and exclusion (i.e., it is me and us versus them), critical thinking (i.e., reasoning, searching for proof, questioning official discourses and apparent truths…). The number of articles, videos, and posts used for this research was based on the principle of saturation, which means that content for each conspiracy narrative was scrolled through as long as the structure and content of the narrative remained unclear to me and finished when I reached redundancy.

Structural narratology is particularly well adapted in the case of BrCTs because conspiratorial rhetoric has kept its style over time—some even suggest there is a tradition of explanation (Billig 1978). For example, the conspiracy narratives about the 2008 financial crisis are the same as those about the Great Depression (Byford 2011), and the 9/11 Truth movement uses interpretive frameworks similar to those drawn by conspiracy theorists who accused President Franklin D. Roosevelt of letting the attack on Pearl Harbor take place in order to force the USA’s hand and have the country enter World War II (Kay 2011). In other words, despite the variety of events and the significant changes the world has undergone over the years in terms of communication tools and channels, the structures of CT have remained constant.

Structural narratology relies on several assumptions (De Saussure 1916/2011; 1976). First, it is possible to discover the underlying principles that compose, structure, and provide meaning to a narrative or group of narratives. Second, texts have abstract levels that should be taken into account. For instance, Barthes (1957) shows how media convey meanings within popular culture that are partly based on ideologies and deeper than the formal meaning that is immediately given to us. Third, a narrative can be understood through two pairs of axes: paradigmatic (e.g., the event in itself) and syntagmatic ones (e.g., the sequence of the events). As these assumptions highlight, structuralism is intimately related to semiotics (Lorusso 2015), that is, the study of “the life of signs within society” (De Saussure 1916/2011, p. 16). For De Saussure (1916/2011), one of the early fathers of structuralism, the sign is at the heart of the language system. Going back to narratives, this means one cannot fully identify and analyze a narrative’s underlying principles if one is unable to decode what the signifiers stand for. In this regard, one major structuralist tenet is that characters and storylines structure texts and semiotic relationships. Characters are textual beings—unifying tools that gather a mass of signs and symbols (Mick 1986).

Data analysis was carried out following the general rules of structural semiotics. The aim was to analyze how BrCTs can be understood as the result of implicit and, therefore, difficult-to-grasp overarching narrative structures that shape (and are shaped by) ethical behaviors and beliefs, as these same structures provide indications of people’s perceptions regarding ethics in the business world. First, the different versions and contexts of the same BrCT were compared with each other, based on Levi Strauss’s (1976) methodology. Second, a referent version of each BrCT was identified based on its occurrence, and a set of notes previously taken for each narrative available was used to outline macrostructures (van Dijk 1980). For instance, BrCTs about Chinese products imported to Africa do not necessarily propose the same protagonists, actions, or objects of action. In the end, the macrostructure of the referent version that was retained is that Chinese rice imported to Africa is poisoned on purpose to depopulate Africa and steal its resources. Third, the 28 BrCTs were coded in the tradition of structuralist narratology, that is, to identify codes or sign systems that provide frames of reference (Jakobson and Halle 1956). As Spiggle (1998, p. 167) reminds us, “the frame arises from inferential efforts as the researcher moves back and forth between analyzing data constructing interpretation.” Based on the readings made in the previous steps, which mainly highlighted a binary worldview that structures the narrative elements (e.g., good or bad, victim or guilty…), coding was done by using Greimassian (Greimas 1982) semiotics and 1976 structural study of myths, which takes account of both the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes of sign systems. As an example, based on the Greimassian actantial model, a series of codes regarding personal ethics, worldview, actions, and social position were created for the different protagonists. Similarly, codes about location, time, or consequences were created for the events. Axial coding (i.e., relating categories) was done through relations of opposition (e.g., categories A and B), complementarity (e.g., categories A and not B), and contradiction (e.g., categories A and not A), as found in the work of Greimas (1983), among others. In parallel and based on Lévi-Strauss’s work (1976), actions in the narratives were structured along syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. This means that attention was given not only to what composes these actions and what they mean (i.e., paradigmatic axis) but also to the order in which they happen (i.e., syntagmatic axis). In the Chinese rice example (and, more specifically, the Nigerian case),⁵ this means that “Nigerian Customs announcement of fake Chinese rice,” “Nigerian ban on rice importation,” and “Nigerian complaints” should be differentiated because of their content (e.g., information per se, protagonists…) and meaning, but they should also be evaluated with regard to the sequence of these events (e.g., the meaning of the narrative is different depending on whether, for instance, “Nigerian ban on rice importation” happens before or after “Nigerian Customs announcement of fake Chinese rice”).

Finally, the BrCTs were re-read in light of the elementary structures of meaning found in the previous step so as to better delineate Souriau’s (1951) diegesis of these 28 BrCTs. While the term diegesis was already used in Ancient Greece, Souriau (1951) gave it new life in film studies before it became well used in narratology, notably by Genette (1997). Diegesis is understood as the visible and invisible universe triggered by the narrative and supported by the movie. In other words, it is everything that could happen or exist in this fictional world that the spectator or filmmaker can imagine (Souriau 1951). In the context of this research, the diegesis is defined as the world that is explicitly and often implicitly (i.e., through indices, see Barthes 1986/1994) referenced by BrCTs; it is what sets the stage. The aim of this final step was, therefore, to better comprehend which worldview(s) conspiracists adhere to when they adhere to business-related conspiracy narratives that potentially shape the conspiracy narratives structures that were found.

In theater and filmmaking, the mise-en-scène is the setting of the stage in such a way that spectators can better identify the world the characters inhabit. The mise-en-scène enables the creation and presentation of the diegesis, that is, the fictional world that spectators can imagine. In literature, this mise-en-scène is mainly carried out through description, which has the same role in creating the diegesis and helps readers explain and justify the psychology of the characters, as well as their actions (Genette 1997). In this first section of findings, I draw on the data collected to develop this fictional world, which helps readers ethically make sense of the different events and characters recounted in a BrCT. To facilitate comprehension, many of the verbatims and examples I provide come from the same BrCT associated with Enedis’s smart meters.

Courts and lawmakers are no longer independent, the lobbies will always win.

This sentence can have at least three interrelated meanings corresponding to the three levels of reading presented in Fig. 2. At a micro-level, it simply highlights the fact (according to the author of this post) that justice and business work hand in hand at the expense of consumers. At a macro-level, it stipulates that justice is supposed to be independent in our societies, remain partial, and protect the population. But today, for financial reasons, justice has been corrupted and our societies suffer from unwanted taboo trade-offs (Fiske and Tetlock 1997)—we will discuss these taboo trade-offs in the next part of this section. At the meta-level of reading, the sentence corresponds to and reinforces the age-old myth of domination and power, according to which the world is made up of dominant and dominated people, and those who have power “will always win.”

At a micro-level, BrCTs use very general rhetoric and reproducible content about CSR failures across five main topics: (1) lies from the organization/brand about the products’ recipe or content, (2) lies from the organization about its real intentions/strategy/values, (3) slavery and manipulation, (4) alliances (between different organizations, between organizations and governments, between organizations and consumers, etc.), and (5) the unfair “David vs. Goliath” fight, e.g., SMEs fighting against multinationals or other international organizations. This means that, regardless of what the allegedly conspiring organization is, the micro-narrative will always involve more or less general rhetoric about one of these five topics. For instance, one could slightly revise the following verbatim about the Enedis smart meter case to have a new conspiracy theory not related to Enedis at all:

They lie to us, obviously. Everything is much more complex because we are in another physical, scientific, and politico-economic dimension, which on this scale (35 million captives) is totally new.[…] Linky is the cornerstone of a new model of society that is being put in place […] We have been working on Linky for over eight years, and we know more than the Enedis staff, who know nothing except the businessman strategies that must be implemented. (source: comments in a forum from R., who presents himself as an Enedis subcontractor—2016).

By simply replacing “Enedis” with “Big Pharma,” and “Linky” with “vaccine X,” a new conspiracy narrative opens a vast world of deception and control. From this general and reproducible content, some more specific information is then added regarding the particular BrCT. This specific information enriches the narrative with more concrete events and proof that potentially make the narrative easier to latch onto, especially in the case of ethical blindness. In the Enedis case, for example, one can move from abstract theories of “another physical, scientific, and politico-economic dimension” to concrete specificities of the smart meter:

Enedis forces us to install smart meters in our homes to watch us 24/7 and make us sick at will with their radio waves […] Every 10 min, Linky can report the power consumed, which means that it can tell whether you switch on a lamp, an oven, a washing machine – in other words, whether someone is at home… (source: article comments from D.P. – 2017).

By providing concrete and more precise information, this micro-level of reading is critical because it is central to the belief of and immersion in the world a BrCT offers. For instance, the information provided about smart meters in the verbatim above offers readers the opportunity to project themselves into this narrative because they also have a home, a washing machine, a lamp, etc., and can then imagine how Enedis potentially spies on and controls them. Just like it is shown that consumers can be transported more easily into a narrative world through self-referencing and then pay less attention to the weak arguments of the narrative (Escalas 2007), this micro-level of reading may operate according to the same logic: to help readers penetrate the fictional world through self-reference and adhere more easily to the theory offered.

These micro-narratives are tainted by a macro-context of evil and neoliberal capitalism. This is the case, for example, with this comment retrieved from a conspiracy website:

the devil’s greatest trick is convincing the world that he doesn’t exist. Neoliberalism is quite similar in some respects. Under the guise of humanitarian values; racial, economic, and sexual orientation equality, social justice, etc. – the policies of the institutions that push for them quite often work to subvert the very causes they profess to want to strengthen. It amounts to nothing less than totalitarian social engineering for fun and profit. (L.B. – 2016).

While conspiracy narratives are often the result of a more latent view of what the system is, this system is capitalism with the marketplace as its best representative in the case of BrCTs. These narratives recount the story of unequal power relations between, on the one hand, Big Business, international organizations, and elites in general, and on the other hand, so-called ordinary people and small companies. By and large, business-related conspiracy narratives depict capitalism as an international corporate command-and-control system that allows wealthy people to get richer at the expense of the poor. Capitalism provides tools for domination and is the result of a simple equation: Capitalism needs many of the poor to make a few rich. The business world (notably, through brands and companies) becomes the symbol of a capitalist system that has imposed its own rules on the population to create unequal power relations, as well as physical, social, and cultural domination.

This macro-environment and the many criticisms of capitalism have to be understood through the following meta-narrative: The need for domination is inherent in humans, and capitalism provides objects of domination. Generally speaking, meta-narratives reveal central, all-encompassing ideas considered to be universal principles about interpersonal relations, human existence, metaphysics, and, more broadly, everything that can help to socially structure societies and explain the order of things. Within meta-narratives, mythological meta-narratives are contemporary discourses about humanity based on myths, past events, or they are stories that assign meaning to a possible future. While the meta-narrative can change slightly over the years, the core idea is mythological and stays the same. In our case, BrCTs underline a mythological meta-narrative about humanity falling prey to both men’s and gods’ desire to be dominant. This mythological context of domination is an enduring topic supported by various myths and ideologies that are ingrained in our cultures—to the point of developing a theory of social dominance in social psychology (Sidanius and Pratto 1999). For instance, mythological narratives teach us that the gods themselves have fought to reach their dominant positions, while humans have sought to speak out and fight back against the gods’ domination. Pagán (2004) points out how many conspiracy theories in Roman narratives included the struggle for freedom from slavery, that is, the opportunity for excluded groups to play a critical role in the world.

This timeless narrative about domination not only shapes macro-narratives regarding the way capitalism is understood but also validates the hypothesis offered by a specific BrCT: While proposing facts that supposedly happened and would prove the existence of a conspiracy, a BrCT implicitly uses mythologically founded elements to validate its hypothesis (e.g., it is in the nature of men to act this way, and since some conspiracies have already been revealed to be the truth, the conspiracy is probably real). Therefore, from an examination of the sentence, “Courts and lawmakers are no longer independent, the lobbies will always win,” we can deduce that lobbies “will always win” is understandable and believable because humans are inherently searching for the dominant position, which triggers more vice than virtue and necessarily makes “courts and lawmakers no longer independent.”

In this fictional world presented above and made up of those who dominate and those who are dominated, BrCTs give individuals the ethical task of situating themselves as a victim (i.e., a good person but a target of the conspirators) or as a guilty party (i.e., a bad person but a beneficiary of the conspiracy). In sum, BrCTs enable individuals to decide whether they would fight for a common or personal interest even as these conspiracy narratives sanction a society where people selfishly protect their own interests at the expense of the common good.

BrCTs propose eight different functional types of actors, called actants (Greimas 1983), and their role in the narrative. These actants help to simplify the complexity of reality, which makes them particularly attractive to people who are ethically blind due to ethical distress. As shown in Figs. 3 and 4, these actants and their roles in the narratives are structured around a Greimassian semiotic square that opposes the terms “victim” and “guilty” and differentiates the good from the bad (in green and blue, respectively, in Figs. 3 and 4). These roles, presented below, are precisely those that BrCT readers and believers can symbolically (or not) take on through self-referencing.

So far, we have seen that BrCTs offer a specific, emotionally engaging view of the world through a narrative mise-en-scène, as well as eight actants that play a specific ethical role in the conspiracy narrative. These eight actants, along with the mise-en-scène, help people situate themselves in the narrative and act accordingly. In this last section of findings, I elaborate on the actors’ performances, who aim at the end of the narrative, and how many of them use a deus ex machina technique, that is, by calling upon external and legitimate forces to end the story. I use this expression since actors’ technique to end the narrative is similar to the use of a deus ex machina in the theater, which suddenly intervenes to put an end to a plot when the situation is all but impossible to resolve. But as we will see below, in the 21st-century business context, actors do not expect God to intervene; instead, they look to non-religious forces inherited from the Enlightenment that supposedly do the right thing for good: science, justice, and public institutions in general.

A BrCT is just one more narrative world offered to people. Some enter this narrative world with hindsight and bemusement when they are not ethically distressed, while others use it from time to time to explain a certain lack of understanding about reality, and others, unfortunately, lock themselves into this narrative world and deny any other narrative world. Below, I propose a four-part agenda structured around the aim of the research, which consists of helping institutional and individual agents protect themselves and others from BrCTs.

Political CSR is based on a well-accepted assumption that is also found in BrCTs: the weakening of the state and power’s increasing asymmetry with business. In conspiracy narratives, it is not clear whether governments and, more generally, non-corporate organizations are playing the Volunteer actantial role (i.e., being at the service of the Benefited) or maintaining their original Targeted actantial role. For instance, if lobbying still shows that governments and international institutions could be considered Targeted actors, corruption scandals also show people that institutions could be Volunteer actors. While institutional bodies often remain the last chance for actors to see unethical practices being punished, conspiracy narratives reveal profound suspicions about governments’ role and interests, as well as doubts about their ability to stay on a level playing field with “Big Business.” This is potentially problematic as conspiracy narratives often make non-corporate institutions the dei ex machina that trigger catharsis, that is, the purification of emotions (Aristotle 1962). Catharsis in theater has a normative function as it shows the audience that doing the right thing is always rewarded and those who are guilty are punished. The problem in BrCTs is that non-corporate institutions appear to have too little power compared with the business world, which lacks virtue in the eyes of BrCTs believers and amateurs. Therefore, catharsis cannot be triggered and may potentially increase ethical distress that leads to ethical blindness and belief in BrCTs.

Articles on political CSR emerge and, agreeing that the state’s status is diminishing, advance the idea of increased governance of companies, especially multinationals (MNCs), to compensate for the state’s failings (for reviews and discussion, see Frynas and Stephens 2015; Scherer and Palazzo 2011; Scherer 2018). This possibility must be given careful consideration by researchers since it challenges a long tradition clearly separating politics and society from business (Mäkinen and Kourula 2012). The point here is not to reject the idea of political CSR outright—politics and business have long been intertwined (Acosta and Pérezts 2019; Djelic and Etchanchu 2017), but to be certain why business ethicists think of and latch onto this idea. To continue the discussions and debates on political CSR (Whelan 2012; Scherer 2018), I invite researchers to question political CSR from an even more critical perspective, as some have started to do (Néron 2016; Singer 2018), or in line with the critical perspectives already taken on CSR (Banerjee 2008; Jones 1996). For example, Kourula and Delalieux (2016) discuss political CSR by taking the case of a French children’s clothing retailer that, in the name of ethics, allows dominant groups to manage waves of discontent while strengthening its hegemonic position. While these power relations are studied in Kourula and Delalieux (2016) from a Gramscian perspective, new research should also be based on the work of Foucault (1975, 2004), whose work on power, close to that of Gramsci (1971), has the advantage of not being associated with a political theory (i.e., Marxism in the case of Gramsci).

Foucauldian concepts can remind business ethicists how the birth of an idea does not just simply happen, rationally, as if it were a logical sequel to the world. For instance, Foucault (2004) puts forward the concept of governmentality to describe how power is not necessarily associated with force and laws but with the subtle conduct of individuals who, through positive means that make them regulate themselves, lead these same individuals to find it rational to be governed in a particular way. More generally, part of the research projects in business ethics should focus on the less obvious dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, the ideologies that construct the concept of political CSR, as well as the disadvantaged groups that are most in need of CSR but are not heard about often enough. For this purpose, I close the paper by challenging our community with two questions that I consider important and in line with Kallio’s (2007) call to break taboos in business ethics: What if political CSR was the product of governmentality and a lack of practical wisdom? And how does the other half live?