Whistle-Blowing

The term whistle-blowing has its origins in the factory or industrial whistle that sounds when a hazardous condition arises. Its current use has been motivated by the need for a neutral or even positive term to characterize the activities of employees who “go public” without authorization concerning what they believe to be compromises to the public interest in the workplace. Although the term was first used to refer to public servants who made known governmental mismanagement, waste, or corruption, it now covers the activity of any employee or officer of a public or private organization who alerts a wider group to setbacks to their interests as a result of waste, corruption, fraud, or profit-seeking.

The normative background to whistle-blowing is an understanding promulgated by organizations that those whom they employ are beneficiaries of an association to which they owe some measure of loyalty. Included in that measure is an expectation that employees will not jeopardize the interests of the organization by revealing certain kinds of information to people outside the organization and, further, that if members are unhappy about something the organization does, they will make it known only to the appropriate people within the organization. What has generated the need for a more neutral characterization of those who go outside the organization has been a recognition that internal mechanisms often fail to deal adequately with organization failures, and that because the interests jeopardized by those failures are wider than those of the organization, the public has a right to know.

“Setbacks to interest” usually involve significant wrongdoing by officers of the organization, often amounting to the violation of human or other important rights, particularly of those served by the organization. The threat to a broader public is thought to justify the strategy of going public. Sometimes, however, the wrongdoing affects those within the organization more immediately than those served by it—for example, exploitative and dangerous working conditions that are ignored by management. And what counts as going public may depend on the way in which an organization is structured. In police organizations, with their strong horizontal loyalties, a person who reports wrongdoing to a supervisor or to internal affairs may be considered a whistle-blower.