Whistleblowers

Broken Lives and Organizational Power

C. Fred Alford

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501712920
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Arbeits- & industrielle Beziehungen

In a dark departure from our standard picture of whistleblowers, C. Fred Alford offers a chilling account of the world of people who have come forward to protest organizational malfeasance in government agencies and in the private sector. The conventional story—high-minded individual fights soulless organization, is persecuted, yet triumphs in the end—is seductive and pervasive. In speaking with whistleblowers and their families, lawyers, and therapists, Alford discovers that the reality of whistleblowing is grim. Few whistleblowers succeed in effecting change; even fewer are regarded as heroes or martyrs.Alford mixes narrative analysis with political insight to offer a frank picture of whistleblowing and a controversial view of organizations. According to Alford, the organization as an institution is dedicated to the destruction of the moral individualist. Frequently, he claims, the organization succeeds, which means that the whistleblowers are broken, unable to reconcile their actions and beliefs with the responses they receive from others. In addition to being mistreated by organizations, whistleblowers often do not receive support from their families and communities. In order to make sense of their stories, Alford claims, some whistleblowers must set aside the things they have always believed: that loyalty is larger than the herd instinct, that someone in charge will do the right thing, that the family is a haven from a heartless world. Alford argues that few whistleblowers recover from their experience, and that, even then, they live in a world very different from the one they knew before their confrontation with the organization.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Be loyal to the story. – Isak Dinesen

ALMOST twenty books on whistleblowing are available through Amazon.com, and more than a hundred articles have been published on the topic. Many of these include case studies. They tell an inspiring story of noble people with strong morals who stand up for what is true and just. They suffer substantial retaliation, and while most are vindicated, a few are not. But even those who are not triumphant in the end know they did the right thing. They are richer and better for the experience, even if it will always pain them. Almost all would do it again.

This has not been my experience as I have listened to whistleblowers tell their tales. Most are in some way broken, unable to assimilate the experience, unable, that is, to come to terms with what they have learned about the world. Almost all say they wouldn’t do it again – if they had a choice, that is. John Brown put it this way:

If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t blow the whistle for a million dollars. It ruined my life. My neighbor kept talking about all these stories he’d read about “the little man who stood up against the big corporation and won.” Well, I stood up against the big corporation and I lost. I didn’t just lose my job. I lost my house, and then I lost my family. I don’t even see my kids anymore. My ex-father-in-law said if I’d been a real whistleblower I’d have been on 60 Minutes.

I spent $50,000 to have my day in court, only it was more like my minute in court. After five years of waiting to get to court, the judge said I didn’t have standing to sue. I was out on the street an hour after I walked in the door. I still owe my lawyer.

My boss, the one who told me to lie to the FBI. He got a promotion. You know what I do now? I deliver pizza. Me, a licensed professional engineer. The Engineers Association, they just wished me luck, said they admired someone who stood up for his beliefs. Take that to the bank. They wouldn’t even help me find a new job. Nobody understands. Lots of people say they admire my spunk, but nobody has any idea of the consequences. No one wants to know.

So, I think I was crazy to blow the whistle. Only I don’t think I ever had a choice. It was speak up or stroke out. So all I can really say is that I wouldn’t do it again if I didn’t have to. But maybe I’d have to. I don’t know.

Most whistleblowers sound more like John Brown than the mythical whistleblowers of the case studies. It is interesting to ask why. Those who write these case studies do not intend to mislead. They have, I believe, listened too much to the content, not enough to the narrative form. It is in the interpenetration of content and form (form as content, content as form) that one comes closest to grasping the affliction of the whistleblower. Most often this affliction is expressed as an odd disconnection between the narrator and his or her story. John Brown is unusual in this regard, more connected than most to his travail. In an attempt to think more systematically about the relationship between form and content in whistleblowers’ stories, I have from time to time turned to the study of narrative.

Though I’ve interviewed whistleblowers at length, most of my time has been spent listening to whistleblowers tell their stories to each other, which is why this is an account of their narratives. The whistleblower support group I attended for almost a year was run a little bit like Alcoholics Anonymous, in which the price of admission was one’s story.

The whistleblower retreat that I attended at the farm of a former whistleblower had the quality of an encounter group. The price of admission was still one’s story, but the stories of many whistleblowers sounded a little different way out in the country late at night, though perhaps I had changed after several days and nights listening to their stories.

If the price of admission to the whistleblower support group was one’s story, then should I tell you my story to entice you to read my book? All I can tell you is that I have never been a whistleblower, and yet I’ve felt like one all my life. In my family no one ever spoke the truth, so I thought I must. Of course, it wasn’t the truth, just my truth, but that counts for something. In my profession, people tell lots of tiny truths, and so it has seemed important to me to try to tell big ones, even if that makes it harder to get it right. The big difference between my situation and that of the whistleblower is that I work in a remarkably tolerant profession, practicing it in a remarkably accommodating academic department. I can say almost anything and be ignored. Perhaps this is why I became so interested in what whistleblowers learned when their truths were taken so seriously, when, in other words, their truths were experienced as a threat to power.

WHAT THE SCAPEGOAT KNOWS

Let us call this whistleblower I am talking about the last man. Not Nietzsche’s last man, who wants nothing more than a comfortable existence, but George Orwell’s (1949, 222) last man in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, who sacrifices everything for a little piece of “ownlife.” Exposed and tortured by O’Brien, Winston Smith is finally placed before a three-paneled mirror, the kind one finds in clothing stores so one can see if the suit fits. Pale, naked, looking like a skeleton, missing some teeth, Smith doesn’t recognize himself for a moment. Says O’Brien, “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct.” The whistleblower is the last man, not just tortured but exposed and sacrificed so that others might see what it costs to be an individual in this benighted world.

Contemporary social theory takes one of two forms. Either it posits the autonomous individual, leading to all the objections of Michel Foucault and others that such an individual is a fiction. Or the theory assumes that the autonomous individual does not exist, which is Foucault’s position, even as he finds sources of resistance in the body, the same place Winston Smith found his.

What if the autonomous individual exists, but the organization cannot stand it, mobilizing vast resources in the service of the individual’s destruction? (Society may not be able to stand it either, but it is not so organized and vindictive.) If this were so, then neither liberal social theory nor Foucault could see it. One would find something that barely exists; the other would be unable to discover the traces of what has been destroyed. Rather than assume that the individual exists, or does not, it may be more fruitful to focus on the ceremonies of his destruction. Consider the possibility that the individual destroyed is still an individual. Indeed, the individual destroyed is the best archaeological evidence of individuality’s clandestine presence in history.

To run up against the organization is to risk obliteration. In a totalitarian regime, nothing remains after one runs afoul of the organization. Before his arrest, Winston Smith’s job was to alter the historical record so as to make it appear that dissidents had never been born. In a democratic society, the sacrificed individual remains. If we listen to him or her we may learn something not just about individuality but about the forces that confront it.

In chapter 6, I define this organization I keep talking about, but not until then. I want first to establish the perspective of the last man, so that we might finally view the organization from his or her perspective (the last man is also a woman). From the perspective of the whistleblower, the organization remains in many ways a feudal entity. Instead of dismissing this perspective as that of the fellow who just got fired by his boss, I suggest we take it seriously – but only after establishing who this last man is and why he or she is so endangered.

How can one best learn from the last man? The answer depends in good measure on what lesson our teacher has to teach. I think the whistleblower has as much to teach us about politics as about suffering. Or rather, it is the suffering of the whistleblower that connects these two terms. The story of the first scapegoat will tell us why. Part of the ancient ritual among the Hebrews for the Day of Atonement, the instructions for the sacrifice of the scapegoat are found in Leviticus 16:21–22: “The priest shall lay both his hands on [the scapegoat] and confess over it all the iniquities of the Israelites and all their acts of rebellion, that is, all their sins; he shall lay them on the head of the she goat and send it away into the wilderness in charge of a man who is waiting ready. The goat shall carry all their iniquities upon itself into some barren waste and the man shall let it go, there in the wilderness.”

Think about how much the scapegoat must know. For many whistleblowers this knowledge is like a mortal illness. They live with it, and it with them, every day and night of their lives. They do not just know the sins of the tribe. They are afflicted with them. My plan has been to follow the scapegoat into the desert of his exile and there to study his affliction so that I might learn the sins of the tribe.

You might reply that not only is this way of putting it melodramatic, but how much I can learn depends on how articulate and thoughtful the whistleblower is. About the first objection you will have to decide for yourself. About the second, there are ways of listening that do not depend on the articulateness of the whistleblower. Not everyone is creative, but everyone has a creative unconscious. Not every whistleblower is articulate, but there is eloquence even in silence and cliché if we are prepared to feel its sources. To put the same point another way, I learned most from those whistleblowers who seemed to feel their experiences most deeply, whether or not they were able to articulate them.

When I listen to whistleblowers, I feel awe at one who has stepped outside the skin of the world and lived to tell about it. The whistleblower has become sacred, a term whose original meaning was both blessed and cursed. Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said that his former friends and colleagues regarded him with neither admiration nor censure but with wonder, as though he were a space-walking astronaut who had cut his lifeline to the mother ship. What was this mother ship? Was it the academic-military-industrial complex, the system, the organization? Call it what you will, it is not so much a precise concept as an overwhelming feeling.

Every chapter aims to explain this feeling. Every chapter is written from the perspective of this feeling. This is not because the feeling is so important in itself but because of what it tells us about the forces that hold society together and their consequences: the willingness of most people to do anything not to be sent space-walking.

The feeling of space-walking, which is approached in several different ways in the chapters that follow, is best characterized by its opposite – what it means to belong to the organization. What it means, says Edward Shils (1975, 266), is that the organization becomes sacred, so that an instruction from a superior

is conceived as a “part” or an emanation of the cosmos of commands and judgments at the center of which is the supremely authoritative principle or a supremely authoritative role incorporating that principle. The particular incumbent of the role … is perceived as the manifestation of a larger center of tremendous power. What the “subject” responds to is not just the specific declaration or order of the incumbent of the role … but the incumbent enveloped in the vague and powerful nimbus of the authority of the entire institution. It is legitimacy constituted by sharing in the properties of the organization as a whole epitomized or symbolized in the powers concentrated at the peak.

To be a whistleblower is to step outside the Great Chain of Being, to join not just another religion, but another world. Sometimes this other world is called the margins of society, but to the whistleblower it feels like outer space. My theory of whistleblowing, if that is what it is, is no more than a standpoint from which to raise a question. What does the organization look like from the perspective of someone who has been forcibly relocated to this other world?

In order for society to be integrated, says Shils, it must “not only give the impression of being coherent and continuous; it must also appear to be integrated with a transcendent moral order” (1975, 266). Though it sounds dramatic, I argue that being a whistleblower means stepping outside this order. It is a momentous step. Most people, including the whistleblower, don’t recognize it as such until the whistleblower has done it. Then he or she knows what it is to go space-walking.

In response, one might argue that Shils is talking about traditional societies. Modem society is marked by multiple centers of meaning, so that, for example, a whistleblower might turn to his or her religion to find meaning after being fired from General Motors for blowing the whistle. It’s a good theory, but it does not work so well in real life. Meaning tends to follow power, and power works to discipline the whistleblower in ways that isolate him or her from alternative sources of meaning. Much may be learned by studying how this happens.

THIS IS NOT YOUR ORDINARY BOOK ON WHISTLEBLOWERS

Like most books on whistleblowers, there are lots of whistleblower stories here. There the similarity ends. Unlike the authors of most books on whistleblowers, I pay lots of attention to the narrative structure of the whistleblowers’ stories. I do this because the stories are fascinating, and their structure helps me understand the stories better. But that is not the main reason. The main reason is that understanding the structure of whistleblowers’ stories has helped me develop a theory of ethics and politics based on their experience. This is my goal, and from this goal stems the tension in the manuscript between my desire to tell the whistleblower’s story exactly as he or she would wish it to be told, and my desire to tell it in such a way that it illustrates the theory I have developed. I want what is impossible, or at least unfair: to be loyal to whistleblowers’ stories only insofar as they illustrate general theories, especially my theory.1

The subject wants his or her story told to the world. From the subject’s perspective, my job is to tell that story as clearly and interestingly as possible, so that others might know, and so the subject might find in the telling a meaning and order to his or her life. I, in contrast, am interested in finding the sources of disorder in the subject’s life, the conflict of voices, so I can formulate a hypothesis about it. Sometimes, the subject will tell me later, this hypothesis was helpful, bringing insight and order. At other times, the subject feels penetrated and misused.

Earlier I said that mine is an account of whistleblower narratives. It is not, however, a recounting. This may disappoint some readers, who expect to encounter the rich and pithy voice of the whistleblower on every page. Though the voice of the whistleblower frequently appears, more in earlier than later chapters, mine is a theory about organizations constructed from the broken narratives of the whistleblower. Mine is not another story told by whistleblowers...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Don’t Just Do It to Save Lives
• 3 Whistleblowers’ Narratives: Stuck in Static Time
• 4 Whistleblower Ethics: Narcissism Moralized
• 5 Implications of Whistleblower Ethics for Ethical Theory
• 6 Organized Thoughtlessness
• 7 The Political Theory of Sacrifice
• Appendix on Problems of Confidentiality
• Notes
• References