The Dynamics of Employee Dissent: Whistleblowers and Organizational Jiu-Jitsu

Whistleblowing is a form of organizational dissent that is rarely successful, instead usually leading to disaster for the whistleblower. Organizational theorists seldom have addressed the question of how to improve whistleblowers strategies. A useful general perspective for doing this is to conceive of bureaucracies as authoritarian political systems. The concept of political jiu-jitsu, from the theory of nonviolent action, is adapted to organizational contexts and used to assess a range of tactics used by organizational elites against dissidents. The resulting implications for whistleblower strategies are assessed by comparison with standard recommendations offered by experienced whistleblower advisers.     

Reading Some Fragments From the Work of Muriel Dimen,or Contradictions on the Spicy Side

ABSTRACT

My piece is concerned with some of Muriel Dimen’s feminist writing of the 1980s and her bold and unyielding pleasure in elaborating a sexual politics rooted in an acceptance of the proliferation of sexual diversities and the ambivalent relations of feelings and theories that so marked the moment. Between subjective narrative, social theory and psychoanalysis Muriel found a new kind of space for a feminist enunciation that could be undertaken while wearing extravagantly lascivious red lizard skin shoes.     

Looking Behavior at Test and Relational Memory in 6‐Month‐Old Infants

Small‐scale eye‐tracking research lends support to behavioral studies of relational memory by 6 months of life. Here, in the largest eye‐tracking test of relational memory to date (n = 276), we replicate these findings and examine the impact of excluding data based on looking behavior characteristics at test. Past work examining infants' preferential looking toward arbitrary‐paired objects and scenes has excluded infants from analysis based upon “insufficient looking” at test. Yet, research suggests that variation in looking behavior may be associated with looking patterns during encoding, as well as trait‐like differences in visual and cognitive processing. Similar to past research, we observed evidence for relational memory among 6‐month‐olds. In keeping with past research, when infants were excluded based on “insufficient looking,” we observed evidence for relational memory only when infants were tested immediately. However, when exclusion criteria were relaxed, infants specifically demonstrated preferential looking during a presumably more difficult delay‐plus‐interference condition. Moreover, analyses revealed that looking behavior during encoding was associated with looking behavior at test. Together, results suggest that infants do possess rudimentary relational memory capabilities, but that experimenters' ability to detect these capabilities is influenced by both experimental conditions and individual differences in looking behavior.