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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| C. Fred Alford, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organization Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001) |
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C. FRED ALFORD's new book presents a powerful commentary on the professional and material costs of blowing the whistle, or reporting illegal or unethical behavior that occurs at one's workplace. He debunks the stereotypical image of the brave and righteous man or woman whose personal risks are ultimately rewarded by the society his or her actions protected. Instead, most whistleblowers, he argues, lose their career and their savings, many lose their house and family, and ultimately their sense of place in the world. Worse, few whistleblowers succeed in effecting change. Even if whistleblowers are ultimately vindicated, many are unable to continue working in their professional field due to informal blacklists against which there is no protection. The typical whistleblower, Alford says, is a divorced 52-year-old nuclear engineer who lives in a two-bedroom apartment and sells computers at Radio Shack. Most whistleblowers he interviewed claim they would not do it again. |
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Using narrative, along with moral, ethical, and political theory, Alford delineates the motivation for individuals to act as whistleblowers, for organizations to expel them, and for society to abandon them. Alford begins with a discussion of the moral motivation for whistleblowers, which he calls "narcissism moralized." He argues that whitstleblowers are compelled to act out of a fear of disassociation with one's ideal self. They do not have an empathetic association with a sufferer, as a rescuer might. Instead, whistleblowers feel morally corrupted by association with an aggressor (89), and "blow the whistle because they dread living with a corrupted self more than they dread isolation from others." (90) This is a "selfish motive for people to sacrifice the apparently objective interests of the self." (93) I found this to be a very interesting and thoughtful analysis. However, though he carefully distinguishes narcissism moralized from blatant self- interest, the discussion connotes a blame-the-victim mentality at times. Furthermore, I found his efforts to compare narcissism moralized with other tenets of moral theory confusing and ultimately offering very limited insight. |
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Alford's presentation of the implications of whistleblower experiences for organizational and political theory was also interesting, and I personally would have liked to see it earlier in the book. He describes organizations as constantly battling to maintain their boundaries in an eat-or- be-eaten competitive environment. Because organizations try to maintain total control over their internal environments, whistleblowers are viewed as "traitors in our midst" who represent external interests that threaten the organization's integrity. In response, the organization "will remove him, not just beyond the margins of the organization, but all the way to the margins of society." (54) Alford offers evidence that most legal protection for whistleblowers is "illusory," since it is "the purpose of law to enshrine existing power differences in society." (111) As such, he presents organizations and society as institutions dedicated to the destruction of moral individualists. |
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Alford's presentation and interpretation of the retaliation experienced by whistleblowers is powerfully written, even though it tends towards melodrama at times. Despite the gross over-simplification of his Big Brother description of social institutions, I found his point of view refreshingly unconventional. I was troubled, however, by how he selected his supporting evidence. It seemed biased towards those stories that support his theory in several ways. First, he defines whistleblowers by the organization's response, rather than by the individuals' acts. When an employee reports unethical or illegal behavior to her boss, who thanks her for the information and corrects the problem, Alford says, "she has performed an act of whistleblowing, but ... she is not a whistleblower. She becomes a whistleblower only when she experiences retaliation." (18) In statistical terms, he is effectively selecting on his dependent variable. |
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Second, his data are drawn primarily from observations and interviews with people in a whistleblowers' support group and from highly publicized accounts in the media. The people who are in support groups and whose stories get publicized are those whistleblowers who have had the most extreme negative experiences. Someone who blows the whistle and is supported, vindicated, and rewarded has no need of a support group and the media never shows up to interview them. The reader, therefore, can not tell if Alford is representing typical whistleblower experiences, or drawing from the tail end of the population. Thus, in addition to defining whistleblowing according to his dependent variable, he seems to select his sample from a segment of the population that is most likely to have had experiences that support his theory. |
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Finally, even within this already biased sample, Alford excludes contradictory data. He tells a story about a member of the support group, Ted, who says, "I'm a new man. Every day I learn something good about myself." Alford goes on to say, "Ted protests too much. For that reason I distrust his account." (39) This is the only example of a positive interpretation by his interview subjects, and he rejects it. He exacerbates the problem by failing to offer any counter-examples when, for example, he describes the unwillingness of professional organizations to support whistleblowers' actions. (166) |
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These methodological decisions unfortunately undermine Alford's theoretical arguments, which rest on the universality of the whistleblower's experience as he presents it. His version of organizational and social theory depends on the collective assertively squelching the moral voice of the individual whistleblower. The implications he presents for moral theory rely on the prevalence of narcissistically moral behavior. Because he failed to offer the reader sufficient information to evaluate the representativeness of the whistleblowers' stories he does tell, I found that many of his assertions ultimately lacked credibility. |
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Corinne Bendersky
University of California, Los Angeles
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