Organizing the identity of the whistleblower:stigma, power and resistance

摘要

Whistleblowing: towards a new theory, by Kate Kenny, is an admirable book on many levels. Let me recount them. First, it deals with a topic of considerable importance in an industry of supreme importance. We have become conditioned to knowing, since the Global Financial Crisis occurred, that the nodal point of capitalism is the supply and flow of capital. The global financial institutions that canalize, manage and oversee these flows are, as we have learnt, too big to fail and that when they fail they fail on an enormous scale that governments have to save by socializing their debts and passing the costs on to their electorates. Some whistleblowers that speak out about some of the corrupt practices that led to this failure clearly play an analogical role to that of canaries in the pits of the early mining industry: they squawked and died as a form of early warning system. The experiences of the whistleblowers that Kenny researched is similar in that they squawked; they did not die literally but often became socially dead, stigmatised, to their colleagues, employers, media and the institutions that enveloped their actions.