“The Dark Pattern”: Corporate Failure and Corporate Scandals
The phrase “dark pattern” has become more and more popular in today’s business world to refer to the dishonest tactics used by companies to take advantage of clients, investors, and even staff members. The term, which was first used to describe the intentional manipulation of user interfaces in digital design to deceive people into taking actions that are not in their best interests, has come to refer to the more general practices of corporate deception, unethical decision-making, and wilful disregard for accountability. When these tendencies become established, they frequently result in scandals and systemic business failures, which undermine public confidence and cause market instability. Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage’s (2025) notion of “The Dark Pattern” reframes scandals not as anomalies, but as predictable outcomes of systemic corporate designs that embed ethical failure into everyday business operations.
The dark pattern in business, woven from separable strands, includes tactics that hide the truth, deceive stakeholders, or take advantage of weaknesses. This includes misleading advertising, evading regulations, and using dishonest accounting techniques. These strategies are intentional attempts to control perceptions and increase revenue; they are not coincidental. Scholars contend that rather than being the result of individual instances of wrongdoing, corporate scandals frequently result from structural and cultural factors (Clarke, 2005). Thus, the pattern offers a helpful prism through which to view how otherwise sensible business practices can lead to organisational failures.
Palazzo and Hoffrage (2025) propose that corporate scandals are not rogue incidents but are bred from the predictable internal pattern of unethical normalization— the dark pattern of corporate behavior. The book elaborates nine “building blocks” of organizational misconduct:
- Rigid ideology – A commonly held belief system that privileges some outcomes at the expense of others
- Toxic leadership – Machiavellian or coercive influences within.
- Manipulative/euphemistic language – obscuring unethical actions behind benign terms.
- Corrupting goals – unrealistic targets that pressure individuals to break rules.
- Destructive incentives – excessive rewards for unethical results.
- Ambiguous rules – enabling plausible deniability.
- Perceived unfairness – rationalizing deviance as deserved.
- Dangerous group dynamics – conformity and in-group bias.
- Slippery slope – gradual escalation of wrongdoing.
Collectively these factors interact/multiply to induce an ethical fading/erosion, that allows “good people to do bad things”. These separable elements weave “the dark pattern” of which the authors speak. We see these dynamics played out in notorious corporate scandals: Enron’s inflated accounting and bonus structures; Wells Fargo’s fake accounts to meet unreasonable quotas; Volkswagen’s emissions fraud; Theranos’s data manipulation—all emerged not from individual villains but from systematic distortions of internal norms and incentives.
Corporate scandals are typically caused by organisational cultures that normalise unethical behaviour rather than by a single act of fraud. Small ethical transgressions progressively turn into the norm, as suggested by Vaughan’s (1996) theory of the “normalisation of deviance.” The dark pattern flourishes in settings that inhibit disagreement, or even disclosure, and elevate short-term performance.
These controversies have a variety of repercussions. Shareholders lose billions of dollars, and communities and workers suffer from joblessness and damage to their brand. Scandals damage corporate governance and capitalism on a systemic level. Furthermore, even for honest businesses, regulatory actions frequently impose harsher compliance requirements, reducing corporate flexibility (Coffee, 2007).
The “dark pattern” metaphor encapsulates the covert factors that contribute to corporate scandals: exploitation masquerading as efficiency, deceit masquerading as innovation, and manipulation masquerading as strategy. Corporate failure is the natural result of these trends and is rarely the result of chance. By putting ethics, responsibility, and transparency first, businesses can end the scandal cycle and build long-lasting trust.
In keeping with the objectives and purview of Qualitative Research in Financial Markets, we are inviting papers for this special issue from a range of epistemological, theoretical, and methodological backgrounds, with a focus on qualitative analysis methodologies. This Special Issue specifically looks for submissions that expand on our knowledge of the connection between Corporate Scandals/failure and their origin in the dark pattern. Our goal is to receive articles that examine new circumstances and provide insightful analysis for management, theory, and policy.
List of Topic Areas
- The Dark Pattern & Digital Interfaces
- The Dark Patterns & Regulatory Response
- Dark Patterns & Consumer Trust
- Financial Misconduct & Dark Pattern
- Organizational Culture
- Crisis Management
- Behavioral Economics & Decision-Making
- Media & Public Perception
- Consumer Psychology
- Societal Impact
- Employee Perspective
- Corporate Governance
- Ethical Technology Design
Journal Information: Scopus Journal Q2, H-Index 33
Guest Editors
Dr. Fakhrul Hasan, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. fakhrul.hasan@northumbria.ac.uk
Prof. William Forbes, School of Business, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK. wforbes001@dundee.ac.uk
Dr. Egor Kiselev, School of Business, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK. ekiselev001@dundee.ac.uk
Submissions Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Key Deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 1st February 2026
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31st December 2026
For more details refer here
