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When people try to speak up about serious wrongdoing in their organizations, they are often ignored and sometimes punished for their efforts. Society tends to accept the suffering of whistleblowers, who often experience significant retaliation, as more or less normal. This book challenges this acceptance. It explores how the narrative might be changed. Whistleblowing draws on emergent theories in the fields of organization studies and sociology to address the questions of why whistleblowers are frequently ignored and why, if they are acknowledged for speaking up, they are then isolated by colleagues, industry peers, and even loved ones. Kate Kenny offers a new way to understand whistleblowing and the experiences of those involved in it, and explains both how whistleblowers can cope and survive their ordeal and how organizations can change to protect and benefit from whistleblowers.--

AbstractFeminist social movements based on workers disclosing sexual harassment and sexual violence have had a dramatic impact on workplaces worldwide. But what are the specific dynamics shaping organizations founded on acts of disclosure? Organizational whistleblowing research has overlooked this topic, while literature on feminist social movements has not, to date, focused on whistleblowing disclosure as a shared experience prompting collective action. In this article I address these lacunae. I isolate disclosure‐based feminist movements (DFMs) as a specific, and important, organizational form, and I draw on relevant insights from whistleblowing theory to shed light on the dynamics therein. I find that first, DFMs are founded on a distinct kind of whistleblowing where members speak out about personally‐experienced embodied violence. Second, movements are galvanized through affective connections formed through the sharing of such experiences, and third, the perceived credibility of individual disclosures are uniquely enhanced through the salience emerging from collective speaking. Extant whistleblowing theory—and literature on feminist social movements—fails to account for organizations based upon embodied and collective experiences of disclosure. In this article a novel theoretical framing based on feminist theory is developed, emphasizing embodied, affective forms of parrhesia involving collective salience that counters whistleblower reprisal. Ideas are illustrated throughout with insights from an exemplar case within the worldwide military #MeToo movement: Ireland's Women of Honour. Contributions for scholarship on feminist social movements and organizational whistleblowing conclude the article alongside insights for practice.

What happens to a person who speaks out about corruption in their organization, and finds themselves excluded from their profession? In this article, I argue that whistleblowers experience exclusions because they have engaged in 'impossible speech', that is, a speech act considered to be unacceptable or illegitimate. Drawing on Butler's theories of recognition and censorship, I show how norms of acceptable speech working through recruitment practices, alongside the actions of colleagues, can regulate subject positions and ultimately 'un-do' whistleblowers. In turn, they construct boundaries against 'unethical' others who have not spoken out. Based on in-depth empirical research on financial sector whistleblowers, the article departs from existing literature that depicts the excluded whistleblower as a passive victim – a hollow stereotype. It contributes to organization studies in a number of ways. To debates on Butler's recognition-based critique of subjectivity in organizations, it yields a performative ontology of excluded whistleblower subjects, in which they are both 'derealized' by powerful norms, and compelled into ongoing and ambivalent negotiations with self and other. These insights contribute to a theory of subjective derealization in instances of 'impossible speech', which provides a more nuanced conception of excluded organizational subjects, including blacklisted whistleblowers, than previously available.

How are organizational discourses enacted by people at work? In this article, instead of treating subjects as somewhat distinct from such discourses, I argue that the two are inescapably intertwined. The concept of 'ek-stasis' helps us to understand this. Ekstasis invokes an idea of the 'self ' that, through processes of identification, is always located outside of itself, embedded in a wider sociality. I explore this dynamic through an in-depth study of the powerful discourse of 'ethical living', and its enactment in one contemporary development sector organization, EWH. This ek-static enactment was somewhat ambivalent: involving mutual recognition between colleagues, but also processes of exclusion and policing. I highlight how attention to feeling and passion was important in understanding the relation between workplace discourse and identification processes, in this setting. This study shows that a view of workplace selves as ek-static is useful for understanding the enactment of discourse at work, and that this enactment can be both passionate and ambivalent.

Whistleblowing is an important form of radical political activism, influencing social reform by fundamentally changing the way we see our world. This article contributes to understandings of whistleblower-activism in cases of wrongdoing on the part of state institutions. Extant theorizations of organizational whistleblowing fall short in explaining such instances. In contrast, this article develops four key dynamics of state whistleblower-activism: disclosures radically outside both organization and state, extreme dependence on supporters, democratic activism through alternative loyalties, and parrhesia revealing a crisis in Western democracy. These insights are elaborated through in-depth exploration of the exemplar case of U.S. national security whistleblower Edward Snowden. We argue that the emergent concept of "exilic whistleblowing," inspired by Hannah Arendt's work on exile, offers novel insights. Contributions extend understandings of whistleblowing theory and practice highlighting critical aspects of exilic whistleblowing as activist resistance: how it can be used strategically as part of activist critique aimed at changing the status quo, and how the exiled whistleblower acts as a vanguard helping to bring about a new political consciousness concerning the state of modern democracy and its capacity to uphold constitutional and international human rights.

In this article, we propose a new way of approaching the topic of ethics for management and organization theory. We build on recent developments within critical organization studies that focus on the question of what kind of ethics is possible in organizational contexts that are inevitably beset by difference. Addressing this 'ethics of difference', we propose a turn to feminist theory, in which the topic has long been debated but which has been underutilized in organization theory until very recently. Specifically, we draw on the work of Bracha Ettinger to re-think and extend existing understandings. Inspired by gender studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy and art, Ettinger's work has been celebrated for its revolutionary re-theorization of subjectivity. Drawing on a feminist ethics of the body inspired by psychoanalysis, she presents a concept of 'trans-subjectivity'. In this, subjectivity is defined by connectedness, co-existence and compassion towards the other, and is grounded in what Ettinger terms the 'matrixial borderspace'. An ethics of organization derived from the concept of the matrixial suggests that a different kind of ethical relation with the Other is possible. In this article, we demonstrate this through examining the issue of gender in the workplace. We conclude by outlining the implications of this perspective for rethinking ethics, embodiment and gender, and in particular for the development of a corporeal ethics for organization studies.

While organizational ethnographers have embraced the concept of self-reflexivity, problems remain. In this article we argue that the prevalent assumption that self-reflexivity is the sole responsibility of the individual researcher limits its scope for understanding organizations. To address this, we propose an innovative method of collective reflection that is inspired by ideas from cultural and feminist anthropology. The value of this method is illustrated through an analysis of two ethnographic case studies, involving a 'pair interview' method. This collective approach surfaced self-reflexive accounts, in which aspects of the research encounter that still tend to be downplayed within organizational ethnographies, including emotion, intersubjectivity and the operation of power dynamics, were allowed to emerge. The approach also facilitated a second contribution through the conceptualization of organizational ethnography as a unique endeavour that represents a collision between one 'world of work': the university, with a second: the researched organization. We find that this 'collision' exacerbates the emotionality of ethnographic research, highlighting the refusal of 'researched' organizations to be domesticated by the specific norms of academia. Our article concludes by drawing out implications for the practice of self-reflexivity within organizational ethnography.