Troubling organizational violence with Judith Butler: Surviving whistleblower reprisals

Abstract

How do workers who encounter violence by deviating from organizational norms make sense of their experiences? Our article engages with Judith Butler's work on vulnerability and troubling to address this. Inspired by these concepts while analyzing empirical data gathered from whistleblowers in financial services, we propose a framing termed “aggression-troubling”. Aggression-troubling encompasses an awareness of: the vulnerability and relationality attending scenes of organizational violence; how imposing ideals of what is “normal” come into play as part of that violence; and how these structures might be destabilized and disrupted—or troubled. Our second contribution is analytic: we find that the singular and immediate presence of the individual other-in-relation—the “you” responsible for exerting violence—is a critical part of how people make sense of the scene of violence. We adopt a methodological approach focused on how individuals’ retrospective accounts of experiences of violence, and we analyze cases of whistleblowing in financial services to develop our arguments. Aggression-troubling by no means downplays the injury and pain that normative organizational violence can cause, nor does it suggest that power relations can easily be overturned. This framing does however offer a deeper exploration of experiences of normative violence. It provides insights into how it can be survived and potentially overcome, with contributions for research and practice.