Indecent exposures: theorizing whistleblowing

Organization Studies, Spring, 1998 by Nick Perry

The term 'whistleblowing' is a relatively recent entry into the vocabulary of politics and public affairs, although the type of behaviour to which it refers is not wholly new. It is employed here to mean the process by which insiders 'go public' with their claims of malpractices by, or within, powerful organizations. This restricted sense of the term is in line with Bok's (1984: 210-229) usage and distinguishes it from such related practices as in-house criticism, official and unofficial 'leaks' and the like. Nevertheless, this allows blowing the whistle to be interpreted as a form of conduct which has a long, if decidedly uneven, lineage. The history of whistleblowing is uneven, in that such practices are intermittently dispersed in time, erratic in their trajectories and indeterminate in their form. Yet they are nonetheless available to and for a narrative of historical continuity, in the sense that such conduct bears witness to those influential and long-established discourses whereby the West proclaims the distinctiveness of its own political tradition (and especially those arguments concerning individual rights, the claims of conscience, the responsibilities of citizens, and the emancipatory power of reason). A consequence of our ineffable complicity with that tradition is that what might otherwise be interpreted as arbitrary incidents of criticism are raised to the status of critical indices of freedom.

To be implicated (no matter how imperfectly and contingently) with these narratives of Western promise undercuts any tendency to view such conduct as either wholly random or as simply too infrequent to admit of any wider significance. If they are interpreted at this elevated level of evaluation, then whistleblowing episodes seem to be constructed across, and to dramatize, the very foundation of the Enlightenment project, i.e. the possibility of combining individual autonomy and social rationality, or of reconciling the claims of truth with the practice of politics.

When filtered through such a discourse, whistleblowing is therefore more than just a new name for an old practice. The use of the term facilitates an active constituting and re-ordering of the historical record. The notion of an affinity between the activities of, for example, Daniel Ellsberg and Martin Luther is both made visible and rendered plausible. This in turn permits a link to be forged between the publication of The Pentagon Papers via The New York Times in 1971 and the public nailing of the Ninety Five Theses to a cathedral door in 1517. What is thereby achieved is a concise, rhetorical gathering together of the early stirrings of 'the modern' and its mature, ambivalent, densely textured but still developing, legacy in the present.

There is a burgeoning literature on whistleblowing, from Peters and Branch's (1972) nod towards the muckraking tradition of journalism to the academic Marxism of Rothschild and Miethe (1994) (cf., e.g. Nader et al. 1972; Mitchell 1981; Westin 1981; Brabeck 1984; Graham 1986; Glazer and Glazer 1989). All these studies contribute to the unproblematic reproduction of the legacy of the modern through the replication and naturalization of its narrative conventions. What is foregrounded in these analyses is: the principled ethico-political stance of the whistleblower versus the governing realpolitik of the system; moral wo/man against immoral organization; the spirited resistance of the precariously sovereign individual against repressive social control.(1) Interpreted in this way, 'blowing the whistle' thus becomes a colloquial and contemporary characterization of the enduring verity of Enlightenment ideals. These texts impart a contemporary gloss to such venerable antinomies and venerated terminology, but they nonetheless carry the message of their durability and persistence.

It would be churlish not to recognize and respond to the appeal of such approaches and the conduct which they celebrate. However, it should also be recognized that the empirical content of these studies stands in an uneasy relationship with their narrative form. Substantively, such writings serve to locate and document the development of a social problem: procedurally, they emphasize the pertinence of enhancing a regime of legislative protection; formally, they define the problem as explicable within the terms of the existing narrative order. It is, however, through their implicit grounding in a humanistic ontology of freedom that these texts serve to smuggle in a consoling and therapeutic insulation against those more awkward theoretical, structural and political issues which are raised by the bleak statistical record on the social fate of whistleblowers.

The fate of whistleblowers is characteristically bleak in that if they have not already decided to resign they can expect to be dismissed from their employment. This was the norm among the (overlapping) fifty or so cases discussed in the 'first wave' studies assembled by Peters and Branch (1972) and Nader et al. (1972). The ten whistleblowers in Westin's (1981) study were all sacked, and only one succeeded in winning reinstatement. Mitchell's (1981) more obviously journalistic account of seven cases also documents job losses, along with arrests, marital breakdown, and ostracism. There is the prospect of being blacklisted and Bok (1984: 212) notes that the (Soviet-style) pattern of routinely referring (US) public-service whistleblowers for psychiatric evaluation is increasingly being emulated by private-sector employers. In the more recent and most comprehensive study by Glazer and Glazer (1989), over two thirds of the 64 whistleblowers interviewed had lost their jobs. Lennane's (1993) brief analysis of 35 Australian cases also documents long-lasting health, financial and personal problems.