Whistleblowing as a Struggle for Recognition

Whistleblowing research has highlighted the various ways that whistleblowing in society is important: to keep us safe (e.g. European Commission, 2014; OECD, 2012), to protect democratic values (Ceva & Bocchiola, 2019), to expose fraud (ACFE, 2018), and to save organizations money (Stubben & Welch, 2020). The whistleblower, however, often pays a price for speaking up (e.g. Lennane, 1996/2012; Kenny & Fotaki, 2021). Research has explored the process of speaking up and highlighted how it is a protracted process (Vandekerckhove & Phillips, 2019), shaped by passionate attachments (Kenny et al., 2018) and the role of the recipient (Loyens & Vandekerckhove, 2018). However, the journey of the whistleblower is often erroneously portrayed as a linear process, with an individual making a disclosure, the organization providing a response or ignoring the issue, and then subsequent disclosures and responses. However, when cases of whistleblowing are studied carefully, this is rarely how things unfold. In this paper, I argue for a shift in focus: to the relationship(s) in the process of whistleblowing, framing the journey as essentially intersubjective. I invoke Honneth’s work on recognition as the basis for this framing, which centers the focus on the intersubjective interactions at play. By building on Honneth’s work to explore how recognition relationships play out in practice, I contribute a theory that frames whistleblowing as a “struggle for recognition”, a process which can involve multiple disclosures to different sources at various times, as well as varied and complex “responses” from others, and therefore more fully capture the complexity of speaking up. This builds on previous research to provide a more nuanced understanding of the whistleblowing journey, and, perhaps more importantly, what supports are necessary to ensure that whistleblowers are able to survive the journey.