About

Patrick Bergemann is an Associate Professor of Organization and Management at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on how individuals, organizations, and states respond to wrongdoing, with particular interest in whistleblowing, social control, punishment, and social networks. He seeks to understand how social relations influence the willingness to report misconduct and what factors prevent individuals from coming forward. His work explores the mechanisms of social influence on crime reporting, whistleblowing, and denunciation, contributing to top management and sociology journals. Bergemann has authored a book titled 'Judge Thy Neighbor: Denunciations in the Spanish Inquisition, Romanov Russia, and Nazi Germany' published by Columbia University Press. Prior to his current role, he was an Assistant Professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Management
• Business
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Operations management
• Public relations
• Law
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Microeconomics
• Labour economics
• Engineering
• Industrial organization
• Marketing
• Finance
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Rhetorical Genres and the Social Control of Stigmatized Organizations: A Theoretical Framework

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  Organizations facing stigmatization often experience markedly different social control—some face severe regulatory sanctions and stakeholder penalties while others weather controversy with minimal impact. This variation in how stigma translates into social control presents a theoretical puzzle: why do similar instances of stigmatization lead to such different consequences? We argue that rhetoric plays a crucial mediating role between stigmatizing labels and social control. Drawing on rhetorical theory and research on social problems, we develop a theoretical framework identifying four distinct rhetorical genres through which organizational stigma is constructed and amplified:

  PublisherDOI

• Organizational Scarring, Legal Consciousness, and the Diffusion of Local Government Litigation Against Opioid Manufacturers

  American Sociological Review · 2025-11-23

  articleSenior author

  Between 2017 and 2020, local government attorneys’ offices in the United States filed a surge of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. Aimed at recovering the costs of the opioid epidemic, this “affirmative litigation” was a novel action for most of them. Participation necessitated a tectonic shift in how they conceptualized their roles vis-à-vis the law. To understand how this occurred, we use a mixed-methods approach that draws on in-depth interviews and event-history analysis. Our investigation reveals the importance of “organizational scarring,” wherein an organization develops a lingering sense of having been wronged by another entity—a feeling that persists via an organizational narrative but does not shape organizational action until much later. Here, scarring resulted from the Big Tobacco lawsuits. As many localities perceived it, states’ distribution of settlement money unfairly disadvantaged them. This scar was activated when the possibility of opioid litigation arose, triggering distrust of state legal action and causing local government attorneys to reconceptualize affirmative litigation as befitting their roles—which facilitated their decisions to sue. Our findings not only shed light on a tactic that local governments are increasingly using to respond to public health crises, but also inform research on organizational learning, diffusion, and legal consciousness.

  PublisherDOI

• Blindfolding, Perceptual Dehumanization and Tolerance for State‐Sanctioned Killing: A Theory of Illegitimate Punishment

  European Journal of Social Psychology · 2025-04-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT The present work integrates cultural practices, perceptual psychology and social cognition to explore the psychological effects of blindfolding in state‐sanctioned punishment. Across four studies, we demonstrate how the use of blindfolds—a seemingly minor aspect of punishment rituals—attenuates configural face processing, a change we argue alters social behaviour. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that blindfolds are associated with a tolerance for harsher punishments. Studies 3 and 4 explore the legitimacy of punitive action; findings from these studies suggest that blindfolding rituals hold the largest effect when the punishment would not be seen as legitimate. These results suggest that historically ingrained punitive rituals may subtly exploit psychological biases to shape public attitudes, offering insights into the psychological underpinnings of institutional legitimacy and societal compliance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Learning the Wrong Lessons: Changes in Physician Practice After Allegations of Malpractice

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  In organizations, when failures happen, blame is often assigned. Although a large body of work has examined the effect of failure on learning, we know far less about how the ensuing blame shapes subsequent work practices. In this paper, we theorize that the experience of blame may motivate individuals to change their work practices in ways to avoid future accusations, which may be at the expense of improving work processes to avoid future failures. As such, individuals may learn the “wrong” lesson. We test our theory using medical malpractice allegations of 3618 physicians overseeing 3.6 million inpatient discharges in Florida from 2010 to 2021. Leveraging quasi-random variation in the timing of malpractice allegations, we find that physicians—as compared to their own prior behavior and a matched sample—reduced responsibility by reducing discharge volume but also increased treatment intensity, indicative of defensive medicine. The change occurred after physicians were notified of a malpractice allegation, but not after the alleged negative event, were most pronounced in physicians with lower task-specific status (recent graduates and lower-ranked medical schools), and occurred even for unsubstantiated allegations where the physician was deemed not to be liable for the event. Our findings indicate that blame – intended to increase accountability and work quality– may paradoxically shift learning away from improving work processes. This work contributes to the learning literature and holds implications for organizations with a “blame” culture. It calls for more care and thought into structuring feedback systems in organizations.

  PublisherDOI

• Shaping the Opportunity Structure of Deviance: A Commentary on Rintamäki, Parker, and Spicer’s “Institutional Parasites”

  Academy of Management Review · 2024-10-17 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• How Social Influence Affects Reporting: Toward an Integration of Crime Reporting, Whistleblowing, and Denunciation

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2024-04-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Reporting—often by ordinary individuals—is the most common means by which authorities become aware of crimes, misconduct, and other types of deviant behavior. In this article, I integrate research across a variety of disciplines and domains to review the role of social influence in the decision to report. Such influences operate at the individual, group, and societal levels to shape reporting behavior, as potential reporters respond to both direct and indirect pressures, along with considering the anticipated reactions of others were a report to be made. Together, these influences can either suppress or promote reporting, which shapes who is identified, investigated, and ultimately punished for deviant behavior within organizations, communities, and states.

  PublisherDOI

• From Social Alignment to Social Control: Reporting the Taliban in Afghanistan

  Sociological Science · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In many settings, witnesses can report wrongdoing to internal authorities such as officials within an organization or to external authorities such as the police. We theorize this decision of where to report as rooted in the policing of group boundaries, as the use of different reporting channels symbolically affirms or disaffirms affiliation with different social categories. As such, both witnesses and other social actors have an interest in where witnesses report. We evaluate this theory using villagers' reporting of illegal Taliban activity in Afghanistan in 2017 and 2018, where witnesses could report externally (e.g., to the national police) or internally (e.g., to village elders). We show how responses to wrongdoing arose from the interaction between self and others' attitudes toward the Taliban, and we reveal how reporting can be simultaneously punitive for the wrongdoer and affiliative for the category to which the wrongdoer belongs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Alignment and Social Control: Reporting the Taliban in Afghanistan

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Getting Away with It (Or Not): The Social Control of Organizational Deviance

  2022-10-23 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen access

  The phenomenon of organizations breaking laws and norms in the pursuit of strategic advantage has received substantial attention in recent years. Such transgressions generally elicit the intervention of social control agents seeking to curb deviant behavior and defend the status quo. In some cases, their efforts result in the deviant behavior being suppressed; in other occasions, however, organizational deviance can persist and even be accepted into the very system of rules that was initially challenged. In this paper, we advance a structured view of this process by formulating a theory of the social control of organizational deviance. Building upon the sociological literature, we classify forms of social control based on their cooperativeness and formality; additionally, we shed light on the outcomes of social control by illustrating the conditions under which they are likely to be more or less accommodative of deviant behavior, as well as more or less permanent. In so doing, we contribute to the scholarly understanding of the role of social control in organizational fields, as well as of the advantageousness of deviant behavior as a strategic option for organizations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Manufacturing Productivity with Worker Turnover

  Management Science · 2022 · 31 citations

  • Business
  • Labour economics
  • Industrial organization

  To maximize productivity, manufacturers must organize and equip their workforces to efficiently handle variable workloads. Their success depends on their ability to assign experienced and skilled workers to specialized tasks and coordinate work on production lines. Worker turnover may disrupt such efforts. We use staffing, productivity, and pay data from within a major consumer electronics manufacturer’s supply chain to study how firms should manage worker turnover and its effects using production decisions, wages, and inventory. We find that worker turnover impedes coordination between assembly line coworkers by weakening knowledge sharing and relationships. Publicly available unit-cost estimates imply that worker turnover accounts for $206–274 million in added direct expenses alone from defectively assembled units failing the firm’s stringent quality control. To evaluate managerial alternatives, we structurally estimate a dynamic equilibrium model (an Experience-Based Equilibrium) encompassing (1) workers’ endogenous turnover decisions and (2) the firm’s weekly planning of its production scheduling and staffing in response. In counterfactual analyses, a less turnover-prone, hence more productive, workforce significantly benefits the firm, reducing its variable production costs by 4.5%, or an estimated $928 million for the studied product. Such benefits justify paying higher efficiency wages even to less skilled workforces; furthermore, interestingly, rational inventory management policies incentivize self-interested firms to reduce rather than tolerate turnover. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management. Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the data sponsor, and K. Moon gratefully acknowledges support from the Wharton Dean’s Research Fund and the Claude Marion Endowed Faculty Scholar Award of the Wharton School. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4476 .

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Wesley Helms

  Brock University

  11 shared

• Alessandro Piazza

  Rice University

  11 shared

• Ken Moon

  4 shared

• Prashant Loyalka

  4 shared

• Brandy Aven

  Carnegie Mellon University

  3 shared

• Joshua Cohen

  3 shared

• Ellen A. Eisen

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared

• Daniel Brown

  2 shared