Organizational Shunning: The Disciplinary Functions of “Non-Sense”

Abstract

Focusing on the symbolic processes that create “outsiders-within,” this article examines the discourse surrounding employees within an organization who are excluded from the everyday rites and rituals that signify organizational membership. What symbolic constructions typify the discourse of those who fall between the cracks of the day-to-day cultural system? Rather than assume that organizational shunning is an infrequent and brief process, this analysis illustrates how the organized silence invoked during shunning transforms organizational paradoxes and competing values into individual personality problems that can be safely located outside the boundaries of the sense-making processes of the organization. In this way, organizational shunning functions as a disciplinary practice that affirms power relations and simultaneously reifies partisan decision-making premises and priorities.

Notes

¹See Blair (1995) for a detailed discussion of discursive fields and statements as well as the similarities and differences between the critical methods of Foucault and Burke.

²Results about gender differences in whistle blowing are contradictory. Sims and Keenan (1998), for example, found that men were more likely than women to be whistle-blowers. Dworkin and Baucus (1998), on the other hand, did not find men were more likely to blow the whistle. Whether and how gender influences whistle-blowing or bullying is outside the scope of this study, but the questions warrant further study.

³Like the question of gender, the issues of how age, length of tenure, and organizational position affect whistle-blowing behavior warrants further study. Mesmer-Magnus and Viswesvaran (2005) found that whistle-blowers were more likely to be older and in higher positions of authority. Sims and Keenan (1998) found that these factors were not significant predictors of whistle-blowing behavior.

⁴For examples of radical critical works of rejection or refusal, see Gunn (2006) or Wendt (1996).