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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1025 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Human Relations |
Volume | 71 |
Issue number | 8 |
Early online date | 10 Nov 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Early online date - 10 Nov 2017 |