On bullshit: Lying as institutional work

Abstract

With only a few exceptions, the institutional literature has yet to reckon with the ways in which deceptive statements can be leveraged to affect the higher order institutional dynamics. Responding to this gap, we theorize lying as a form of discursive institutional work strategically leveraged to variously maintain or disrupt institutional fields. To that end, we suggest that four distinct forms of lying (i.e., maintenance lies, defensive lies, noble lies, and demagogic lies) will be differentially likely to succeed in advancing the liar’s preferred form of institutional work based on salient characteristics of the field the liar is embedded in. That is, we suggest that fields are characterized by differing degrees of truth regime fragmentation, or the fragmentation of various communities’ more-or-less discrepant sets of normative rules for discerning what statements constitute lies and what consequences should apply to liars. Various degrees of truth regime fragmentation are said to differentially facilitate the success of maintenance, defensive, noble, and demagogic lies. In theorizing lying as a form of discursive institutional work, we contribute to both the institutional and social psychology literatures, most notably through attempting to explain one source of a salient contemporary “grand challenge,” that being the degradation of political discourse in Western polities via the resort to deceit as a means of advancing political ideologies.