Censored: Whistleblowers and impossible speech

Abstract

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.

Mental Heath as a Weapon: Whistleblower Retaliation and Normative Violence

“…Normative violence describes the exclusion from representation that can leave subjects vulnerable to both symbolic extinction and to physical precarity (Butler 2004b). The in-depth account presented here highlights how people were excluded first because of their attempts to speak up, which then lessened their viability as organizational subjects (see also Kenny 2017). This left them in a precarious position, even more vulnerable to symbolic violence in the form of retaliation, smear campaigns and labeling because they were already positioned as mental health sufferers.…”

“…Building upon existing Butler-inspired 'recognition-based critiques' of power within organizations (Riach et al 2014(Riach et al , p. 1693, we contribute insights into the role of organizations and subjects in deploying normative violence (Butler 2009;Varman and Al-Amoudi 2016). We add to existing understandings of how normative violence against whistleblowers operates through recruitment practices and social networks, postdisclosure (Kenny 2017), specifically by showing how this can occur where mental health is deployed in cases of whistleblower retaliation. We highlight the affective and ambivalent dynamics therein.…”

“…In this way, affective subjectification is 'radically external' to the self; rather than being an 'internal' phenomenon it acts as a 'technology of subjectivity' that links subjects to wider social structures (Hook 2007, p. 270). Such insights notwithstanding, affect tends to be overlooked in poststructuralist accounts of subjectivity within organization studies (Stavrakakis 2008) despite some exceptions (Kenny 2012(Kenny , 2017Tyler and Cohen 2008). By introducing concepts of desire, recognition and affect, Butler enriches Foucault's account of how the subject becomes 'entwined' with power/knowledge.…”

“…While Butler does not expand on this in the context of work organizations, others have recently illustrated how her 'recognition-based critique of the conditions governing viable subjectivity' (Riach et al 2014(Riach et al , p. 1679 can shed light on dynamics of normative power in organizations (Borgerson 2005;Harding et al 2013Harding et al , 2014Riach et al 2016), not least in relation to sexuality and gender (Tyler and Cohen 2008) but also the consumption of management textbooks (Harding 2003), ethical workplaces (Kenny 2010) and organizational violence (Varman and Al-Amoudi 2016). This theory has recently been applied to understand the experiences of whistleblowers in the aftermath of their disclosures (Kenny 2017) and their exclusions from recruitment practices and friendship circles because of having engaged in 'impossible speech.' It has not yet been utilized in studies of whistleblower retaliation and mental health.…”

“…Specifically, there is no attention paid to how the wrongdoing organizations deploy various discourses including that of mental health, to undermine the claims of whistleblowers who often internalize and enact these. In this article, we contribute to research on this important issue by drawing on Judith Butler's 'recognition-based critique' of subjectivity and power, a growing area of interest in organization studies (Riach et al 2014(Riach et al , p. 1679; see also Borgerson 2005;Harding et al 2014;Kenny 2010Kenny , 2017Riach et al 2016;Tyler and Cohen 2008). This view builds on the resource-based approach because it sees power as inherent to the very formation of the subject, as she constructs a sense of self through identification with discourse, rather than simply an entity that is either possessed or not.…”