Collective Frames of Wrongdoing During Emergency: The Dilution of the Care Facilities’ Contagion Scandal in Italy During the COVID-19 Emergency

How civil society makes sense of organizational scandals that entail allegations of wrongdoing during times of systemic emergency plays an important role in how these events are ultimately addressed. Yet we know little about what happens when disruptive events are attached to concurrent frames (i.e., wrongdoing, systemic emergency) by different stakeholders. We combine qualitative and topic modeling techniques to analyze the case of contagions in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) in Italy during the COVID-19 outbreak as collectively problematized by journalists, accused parties, and the general public on social media. We document a process of scandal dilution during a systemic emergency. We theorize the dilution as the consequence of a process of collective frame lamination whereby involved actors enact different strategies of scandal–emergency interplay: layering information, deflecting blames, and amplifying emotions. We add to work on collective framing of disruptive events and to research on organizational wrongdoing and emergency.