Indecent Exposures: Theorizing Whistleblowing

Abstract

'Whistleblowers' are defined as insiders who 'go public' in their criticism of the policy and/or conduct of powerful organizations. Their actions dramatize the more general issue of the relation between politics and truth, between power and knowledge and the institutions which sustain them. This is exemplified by those problems which arise out of the changing relation between scientific-technical expertise and the contemporary corporate system. The associated contradictions form the focus of this paper, in which the institutional and discursive characteristics of a cognitively efficacious technoscience are contrasted with the traditional premises of political action and the principles of political organization. The construction of innovation networks and the development of uncoupling practices are interpreted as working solutions to the problem of reconciling these otherwise distinct institutional imperatives with each other. These solutions, in their turn, presuppose the exercise of communication control over the scientific-technical and professional stratum, a control legitimated by a system of institutional and organizational myth and ceremony. The associated structurally generated dilemmas are thereby displaced onto individuals, a fraction of whom blow the whistle. This form of occupational 'suicide' is thus available for interpretation as either heroic or pathological. In this paper, however, the psychology of the whistleblower is viewed as less pertinent than the social construction and imputation of motives. The statistical (in)frequency of such behaviour is seen as being less pertinent than the extent and intensity of the controversy it promotes.