t, he or she will be faced with choosing between these contradictory points of view. The individual is faced with deciding whether or not to take this action and precisely how to do it:
These questions are a lot easier to answer if your company has a code that defines unacceptable practice and provides a mechanism--like a hotline to an ethics office--that offers you both anonymity and somebody to talk to. Even then it's not simple (Loeb, 1995, 3).
Even when a whistleblower is successful, he or she may be left with feelings of guilt for what has transpired.
Research shows that whistleblowing is not just a controversial issue but one that creates a certain ambivalence in employees and employers alike, as well as in the public at large. Perry (1998) says that whistleblowers exemplify "the more general issue of the relation between politics and truth, between power and knowledge and the institutions which sustain them" (Perry, 1998, 235). He finds that whistleblowing is not merely a new name for an old practice. Instead, he finds that whistleblowing today is as much an image based on history, an image linking actions by moral persons against immoral corporations in the present to such incidents in the past. In his study, Perry holds that "the contradictions which are associated with the notion of whistleblowing are more instructive than the consistencies" and that these "contradictions are at work in how such episodes are produced, how they are encoded and distributed by media institutions and how they are interpreted by publics" (Perry, 1998, 253).
Whistleblowers can be shown to think twice about the possibility of losing their jobs, much as the public may think twice about whether whistleblowing is a social benefit or not. The structure of work in America in general militates against the whistleblower, who can be fired and then find him or herself effectively "blackballed" in his or her industry simply by being labele...