The Problem of Whistleblowing

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the problem of whistleblowing in the organisations.Whistleblowers are insiders who go public in their criticism of business practices of the organisation. This form of occupational suicide is thus available for interpretation as either heroic or pathological. Many contradictions are at work in how such episodes are produced, how they are encoded and distributed by media institutions and how they are interpreted by publics. In practice we are faced with internal as well as with the external whistleblowing. We argue that individuals go public more often if there is no intraorganisation mechanism to enable internal whistleblowing. Key words: organisation, conflict, loyalty, social responsibility