22nd Jan 2015 6:30pm-8:00pm
G7, Pavilion Parade
Dr Wim Vandekerckhove, University of Greenwich
I will argue that whistleblowing puts management in an all or nothing situation. Whistleblowing must either change the meaning of management, i.e. what managers do and what it is they manage, or else crumble back into a marginal phenomenon of unsuccessful employee voice. In other words, the current characteristics of whistleblowing and the current sense-making around management cannot both win.
I start my expose based on my analysis of whistleblowing in my book from 2006 (Whistleblowing and Organisational Social Responsibility, Ashgate). I argued there that because we currently make sense of organisations relying on the normative concepts of flexibility, decentralisation, governance, stakeholders, and network, managers are already convinced internal whistleblowing must be made to work - but they don’t know it yet. Successful internal whistleblowing is a necessity for an organisation’s continuity if the organisation is understood using the above buzzwords. However, internal organisational whistleblowing mechanisms are not without ethical risks themselves (i.e. the risk of continued domination). I identified some in my 2006 book, and in my talk I will review current trends in whistleblowing against those risks.
The contribution of my talk lies in a retake of the 2006 analysis, in which I maintained an autopoietic perspective of the organisation (Luhmann). Instead, I argue that from a network perspective, whistleblowing puts management in a much deeper crisis than I previously concluded. I also use Touraine and Foucault (parrhesia) to suggest how whistleblowing is not merely pointing out wrongdoing in organisations but rather shows management as failing.
