Reframing the whistleblower in research: Truth‐tellers as whistleblowers in changing cultural contexts

Whistleblowing is fraught with conceptual dilemmas, including those who may be considered whistleblowers and fundamental concepts associated with the term. Whistleblowing is a dynamic concept, set within and deeply related to culture, yet scholarship has focused primarily on whistleblowing and its ramifications within management and organizational settings, as opposed to engaging with the wrong‐doing disclosed and conceptualizing how we assign meaning to whistleblowers/ing in changing landscapes of societal values and cultural institutions. To grasp the cultural sociological understanding of what constitutes whistleblowing, these themes and how they are shaped need to be drawn out in scholarship. Thus, the purpose of this review is to determine through which disciplines, lenses and discourse whistleblowing has been developed in academia and to identify gaps in disciplines and methods, highlighting how these affect our broader understanding of whistleblowing. This review article offers preliminary insight into how people engage in meaning‐making connected with terms such as whistleblowing, abuse and corruption through the lens of the #MeToo movement. The article encourages further research in disciplines such as sociology, political theory, human rights, socio‐legal studies and particularly, within cultural sociology.     

Whistleblowing processes in Swedish public organisations—complaints and consequences

Research on whistleblowing in Sweden is scarce. In this explorative study 21 cases of whistleblowing from human service organisations in Sweden were examined. Extensive material from thematic interviews with 28 whistleblowers, 30 key persons and documents from supervisory authorities such as the National Board of Health and Welfare have been analysed.

Some findings were that the organisation problems motivating whistleblowing were usually cutbacks in vital services for users, unethical working methods or abuse of clients. Internal whistleblowing was usually met with silence from supervisors and directors. The whistleblowers then went on with external whistleblowing by reporting the bad conditions to the higher supervisory authorities who started thorough investigations. Their actions caused a lot of negative reactions in the organisation, but they were also supported by media and ordinary citizens.

The retaliation processes against the whistleblowers were described. Half of the interview group has left their positions, either on sick leave or by changing jobs. The findings show a stigmatisation process with severe consequences for the individuals. But the cited organisations usually had to change their illegal or immoral practices and benefited in the long run from the whistleblowing events.     

The Roman Catholic Church: A Centuries Old History of Awareness of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse (from the First to the 19th Century)

Debates in international forums and in mainstream media on the role, responsibility, liability, and response of ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) toward clerical child sexual abuse (cCSA) fail to take into account the historical roots and awareness of the problem. Reports also fail to mention the historic organizational laws RCC developed over centuries. In contrast, RCC documents evidence that the Catholic Church not only carried century’s old history of cCSA, but also repeatedly condemned cCSA by successive papal authorities, organizational laws, and institutional management mechanisms. During the first millennium, however, church laws remained confined to the bookshelves and were not converted into appropriate management policies and infrastructural models. This was largely due to the absence of a central administrative organizational structure, which developed later in the 12th century, following the Second Council of Lateran (1139) when the Papacy asserted its authority to establish administrative control over the organizational church. It was only then that management policies started to be framed and institutional structures enacted to deal more appropriately with cCSA from the 14th to 20th centuries. Despite this, RCC developed a culture of secrecy using clandestine organizational management models and institutional laws prescribed in 1568, 1622, 1741, 1866, 1922, and 1962 which aimed to manage cCSA. The current study traces reported cCSA as far back as the first century and critically examines the organizational laws, and institutional policies developed by RCC to address clerical sexual misconduct up to the end of the 19th century.     

Leaks,legislation and freedom of speech: How can the law effectively promote public‐interest whistleblowing?

Attention is increasingly being focused on leaking, whistleblowing and associated compliance and incentives questions. The authors outline the differences between leaking and whistleblowing, notably on protection of the disclosers. They review provisions of international conventions on human rights and corruption, and compare approaches to protecting freedom of speech in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Their findings highlight the complex, sometimes conflicting issues involved: public, individual, commercial and financial interests; abuse of power; security; confidentiality; the individual as law enforcer; and the employment relationship.     

What drives a tough call: Determining the importance of contingency factors and individual characteristics in communication executives’ stance decision-making through a conjoint analysis

To further the understanding of how communication executives make tough calls in times of organizational-public conflict, we use a conjoint analysis to identify key drivers for organizational stance decision-making. This is the first-ever conjoint analysis applied to advancing the contingency theory of strategic conflict management by examining the relative importance of key contingency factors as determined by practitioners with varied individual characteristics. This study investigates: 1) the relevant importance of and dynamics between three key contingency factors (i.e., external threats, organizational characteristics, and dominant coalition characteristics); 2) the influence of individual characteristics (e.g., gender, experience, and personal ethics) in stance decision-making process; and 3) how different types of organizational stances (i.e., general stance, action-based accommodation, and qualified-rhetoric-mixed accommodation) are determined by these contingency factors and individual characteristics in different conflict situations. Results generated among our communication executive participants include: individual characteristics (i.e., gender, ethics and social responsibility, whistleblowing tendencies, and over 20 years in the communications field) are influential for their strategic conflict management decision-making. Implications for refining the contingency theory and unearthing complex public relations decision-making processes via novel statistical techniques are discussed.     

When organizational crises meet nationalism: Crisis communication of multinational corporations in the Chinese context

The purpose of this study is to explore how nationalism shapes the public perception of multinational corporations’ crises on Chinese social media. Using qualitative content analysis, this study examines 1000 public comments from the top 10 hashtag posts and explores the interaction between nationalist expression (i.e., content and sentiment of nationalism) and the public’s perception of the United Airlines crisis in 2017. The findings demonstrate how nationalist content impinged upon the interpretation of United Airlines’ misconduct. Six concrete emotions (anger, hared, amusement, pride, encouragement, and disgust) were identified from the sample comments, which were categorized into inward-directed and outward-directed nationalist sentiments. Given the findings, this study argues that nationalist expression has driven the evolution of the United Airlines crisis beyond the discussion of organizational misconduct. While inward-directed sentiment served to strengthen the Chinese public’s national identity, outward-directed sentiment was utilized to exclude multinational corporations as “out-groups.” The theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.     

Principals and Agents: An Investigation of Executive Compensation in Human Service Nonprofits

This study proposes a revised agency theory for the nonprofit sector, distinguishes between the extent of agency and the extent of monitoring, and compares the magnitudes of the two impacts. Using panel data for 1998–2003, the paper tests whether monitoring by principal-stakeholders such as donors, clients, the government, and the board reduces the opportunity for executive misconduct such as extravagant spending on compensation and perquisites. Given the theory, the findings show that two effects influence CEO salaries. First, while nonprofit endowments provide a fiscal cushion in tough financial situations, by offering “organizational slack” they also increase the CEO’s opportunity to steal or raise her compensation (i.e., agency effect). Second, donors utilize monitoring mechanisms such as auditing or direct observations, which limit the opportunity for misconduct and reduce executive pay (i.e., monitoring effect). In the final analysis, the monitoring effect is greater than the agency effect, which implies that even if agency problems are present, the monitoring that donors provide offsets them.     

Police Crime: The Criminal Behavior of Sworn Law Enforcement Officers

This essay examines the criminological conceptualizations and research on police crime, that is, the criminal behavior of sworn law enforcement officers. It starts with an overview of the conceptualization of police crime as it relates to organizational and scholarly perspectives of social deviance. Police deviance is often conceptualized to include various misconduct, corruption, and/or crime committed by police organizations and police officers. This essay focuses on police crime resulting in the arrest of a sworn law enforcement officer and is organized within a conceptual framework that incorporates five types of police crime: sex‐related police crime, alcohol‐related police crime, drug‐related police crime, violence‐related police crime, and profit‐motivated police crime.     

Self‐Reported Likelihood of Whistleblowing by Social Work Students

This article presents a first study on the professional–ethical dilemma of whistleblowing in social work, and suggests some lines for further research on this topic as well as ways for integrating it in the social work curriculum. The study examines the self‐reported readiness of social work students to blow the whistle, whether internally or externally. Internal disclosure entails reporting the wrongdoing to an authority within the organization. External disclosure entails reporting the offense to an outside agency, such as the police, professional organization, or press. The findings indicate that the students view the acts that are detrimental or cause injustice to the client in a very serious light. In dilemma situations such as these, the students reported a willingness to act. The students also report considerably greater likelihood of whistleblowing internally than externally.     

Acts of Last Resort: Asylum,Whistleblowing and the Anthropology of Secrecy

Anthropologists face fresh challenges as they endeavour to conduct research in an increasingly securitised and secretive world. Those who wield asymmetrical power in society often seek to guard information and knowledge. Therefore, it is imperative that anthropologists seek new ways of navigating the politics of secrecy if they are to reveal anything of its inner workings. In pursuit of this imperative, this paper examines practices of whistleblowing and posits secrecy as a dialectic that is characterised by processes and practices that work towards concealment, as well as revelation. In shifting the analytical focus from that which is concealed to what is revealed in acts such as whistleblowing, we contend that anthropologists may elucidate something about secrecy that is revealing of context-specific forms of agency and power. In doing so, analysis draws upon Australia’s secretive immigration and border protection regime and in particular a recent government inquiry that enabled whistleblowers to reveal details of secrets that had previously been closely held.     

WHY ZERO TOLERANCE OF MISCONDUCT IS UNDESIRABLE IN CONTESTS

Competition can foster misconduct in any circumstance where the organizer of a contest cannot perfectly monitor contestants' actions or when doing so is prohibitively costly. Although misconduct comprises all actions that are contrary to the interest of the organizer, it is not necessarily the case that it is optimal to prohibit all such behavior. In this paper, we determine the equilibrium level of misconduct chosen by players in a symmetric rank‐order tournament between two competitors in which the organizer tolerates some level of misconduct. In addition to showing that zero tolerance may not minimize the level of misconduct in equilibrium, we show that there exists a range of tolerated misconduct where a symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium exists with players cheating (i.e., misconduct above the tolerated level) with some probability. When the gain from misconduct is uncertain and unknown the contest organizer faces a tradeoff: tolerating more misconduct will reduce such behavior when the state of temptation is high, but increase it when temptation is low. (JEL J33, K42)     

Teacher Sexual Misconduct: Grooming Patterns and Female Offenders

Educator sexual misconduct has received increasing attention over the past decade. The attention has exposed a number of concerning issues, including a lack of formal research in the area and difficulties in recognizing and prosecuting cases. Public responses to high profile cases of sexual misconduct involving female teachers suggest that gender-biased views on sex offenders remain prominent in society. This article will review the literature on female teacher sexual misconduct in addition to what is known about grooming patterns and warning signs. Finally, current dilemmas in resolving cases of educator sexual misconduct will be discussed, and basic prevention strategies will be recommended.     

Social Control and Intersectionality: A Multilevel Analysis of School Misconduct,Location, Race,Ethnicity, and Sex

Adolescent violence and misconduct, especially within schools, is a top sociological and educational concern because of the detrimental effects on adolescent physical health, emotional well-being, and educational progress. Concurrently, public schools in the United States are in the midst of a demographic transformation. More importantly, prior research suggests contextual characteristics are associated with rates of deviant behavior particularly in urban areas where racial and ethnic minorities reside. What remains uncertain, however, is the relationship between social control, intersectionality, and school misconduct. This study utilizes data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 and incorporates multilevel modeling techniques to examine how the link between social control and adolescent school misconduct may differ by race, ethnicity, and biological sex in urban, rural, and suburban locations. The results suggest intersectionality may matter when understanding the associations between social control and school misconduct. The implications of how intersectionality may matter in social control are discussed.     

Science and its Others: examining the discourse about scientific misconduct through a postcolonial lens

This article investigates the current discourse about scientific misconduct from a postcolonial perspective. It traces the development of a causal story about scientific misconduct, blaming misconduct on so-called foreign scientific cultures said to be most prevalent among developing countries. The paper attempts to show how the discourse on misconduct is structured by themes and logics of coloniality as well as diverges from them, exhibiting shifting categorisations and images of the Other, which oscillate between the Other as a backwards savage and the Other as an advanced machine. Such contradictory categorisations will be argued to be both interpretable as movements to abandon prevailing ideologies of efficiency and progress within science and to make science more inclusive as well as means to uphold and re-establish existing patterns of coloniality in the face of historical changes both within and outside of academic research.     

Introduction to the Current Commentaries

ABSTRACT

Despite federal and state laws and policies aimed at preventing sexual misconduct by school employees, one in ten American students will experience sexual abuse or misconduct at the hands of a K-12 school employee. To explore why such sexual misconduct continues to occur, this study examined the effectiveness of education policies by investigating whether and how school employees understand these policies, how they are implemented, and how loopholes may undermine their intent. This qualitative case study was conducted in three Virginia school districts and included 46 semi-structured interviews with school district employees and county, state, and federal government employees associated with cases of school employee sexual misconduct, and extensive document analysis of school policies and procedures, laws, and court records. Analyses revealed an absence of policy implementation, demonstrated most seriously by a lack of awareness and understanding of policies among school employees, underreporting, and ineffective data collection. The study also identified a number of loopholes in the implementation of policies, resulting from a mismanaged intergovernmental system. The analysis suggests that understanding and implementation of policies meant to prevent sexual misconduct by school employees are fragmented; this fragmentation may be contributing to the continued prevalence of sexual misconduct by school employees.     

Applying a US Police Integrity Measurement Tool to the Eritrean Context: Perceptions of Top-Level Eritrean Police Officers Regarding Police Misconduct

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of data from a police integrity measurement survey administered to 107 top-level Eritrean police officers. Respondents were asked for their opinions regarding the seriousness of police misconduct, disciplinary action recommended, and their willingness to report fellow police officers engaged in such misconduct. The surveyed police officers considered some types of misconduct (e.g. off-duty work and accepting gifts) to be significantly less serious than others (e.g. opportunistic thefts from crime scenes and bribery). The findings suggest that the greater the seriousness of the offence, the more likely the officers were to recommend more severe disciplinary action. The survey evidence also indicates that, for six of the ten police misconduct cases, the majority of the respondents revealed they would report the misconduct, which suggests the police code of silence in the context of the Eritrean policing environment is weak.     

Faster,harder, longer,stronger – management at the threshold between work and private life: The case of work place health promotion

This paper studies Work Place Health Promotion at two international corporations as an example of an unobtrusive control that targets employees’ lifestyles. It uses Michel Foucault's concepts of neoliberal governmentality and post-disciplinary control to show how Work Place Health Promotion breaks with the disciplinary logic of control most commonly associated with studies of unobtrusive controls in organizations. While discipline is centripetal, correcting employees’ misconduct so that they freely keep within prescribed norms, Work Place Health Promotion is centrifugal, targeting employees’ lifestyles and promoting those existing faculties and inclinations that may increase their activity, performance and their health. It hereby emerges as less restrictive than organizational discipline, but also as more discriminating. For not only does it subject employees’ lifestyles to an economic logic of investment and disinvestment, it also contributes to an exclusion of employees that fail in this regard in the name of their lack of health.     

“Children's Talk and Parental Fear”. Cases of Sexual Misconduct in Danish State Schools 1900–19701

Cases of sexual misconduct in Danish state schools became the objects of attention in the years following the turn of the 20^th Century. An analysis of 85 cases where teachers were accused of sexual misconduct towards their students reveals that the period from 1900 to 1970 present a set of changes in the attitudes to and management of intergenerational sexuality. Throughout these years there existed three ambivalent features relating to the child and its sexuality, to the pros and cons of reporting the case, and to the behaviour of the masculine teacher at a time of changing pedagogical ideals.     

Ethical publishing: the innocent author's guide to avoiding misconduct

Publication misconduct includes a range of unethical behaviours, such as plagiarism, breach of confidence and in appropriate authorship. The most egregious cases are easy to recognize and widely condemned, but the gradient between normal and unethical behaviour is often a gradual one. Clinicians and researchers should be aware of the full spectrum of publication misconduct and understand that some widely accepted practices may be unethical. This paper describes the various types of publication misconduct and offers guidance to authors, reviewers and journal editors about ways to detect and prevent them.