Whistleblowing As An Ethical Dilemma
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Whistleblowing entails an ethical dilemma as the individual considering becoming a whistleblower is torn between two competing loyalties, loyalty to the corporation and loyalty to society or the law or some higher morality. Whistleblowing can be defined as the attempt by an employee or former employee of an organization to disclose what he or she believes to be wrongdoing in or by the organization. One problem is that whistleblowers nearly always experience retaliation, ranging from being fired to being vilified. Society recognizes that there is a need for whistleblowing, the need to expose corruption and wrongdoing, and legal structures have been developed to encourage and protect the whistleblower, showing that society recognizes this as a socially valuable act. Inherent in any discussion of the matter is a comparison and conflict of responsibilities--both the employer and the employee have responsibilities to themselves, the organization, and society, as well as to each other. The whistleblower in a sense challenges this relationship by accusing the employer of having abrogated his or her responsibility, and the employer in turn claims that the employee is doing precisely that by revealing confidential matters, true or not. The law says that revealing the truth is socially valuable and that both parties have a responsibility to do so, while revealing false information on either side is to be punished. Freedom and responsibility here go hand in hand.
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e language and onto the agenda of American public debate has been shaped by such particularities of time and place. What makes the practice of more general and theoretical interest, however, is that the very notion of whistleblowing is highly symptomatic of, and sensitive to, emergent features of social structure and political process. This is a characteristic it shares with its obverse, the concept of white collar crime (cf. Aubert 1952; Carson 1980) so that the meaning and significance of both notions is contested. Thus, in the United States, whistleblowing is partially protected by law, but, nonetheless, is likely to be penalized with impunity. Conversely, white collar crime is formally subject to legal sanction, but prosecutions are so infrequent as to have prompted doubts as to whether the term 'crime' can meaningfully be ascribed to such conduct. The point to note is that the situation is not static with respect to either of these concepts. Thus there have been incremental improvements in the legal position of whistleblowers (Glazer and Glazer 1989)(2) and an enhanced awareness of, and some initiatives against, white collar crime.
This pattern of contestation and dispute is not restricted to technical questions of le
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Approximate Word count = 9891
Approximate Pages = 40 (250 words per page)
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