Session 8: Bullying in the Workplace (2)
1st Global Conference
Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria
Telling the Story: Cultures of Violence in the Workplace
Lacey Sloan
Department of Social Sciences, Qatar University, Qatar
Bullying and mobbing (group bullying) are secretive, targeted, and widespread forms of abuse in the workplace (European Foundation, 2002), which negatively impact the individual, group, organization, and community. While often ignored or downplayed, the consequences are destructive and pervasive. Individuals suffer, organizations lose their strongest employees, and creativity/productivity suffer. Identifying and remediating this complex and veiled individual and group behavior enhances the quality of the workplace; and supports organizations as central to meeting human needs (Galtung, 1990; 1998; 2008).
While the issue of workplace mobbing and bullying have been studied in Europe and Canada, there has been little research on the topic in the U.S. This paper explores the issue of bullying and mobbing in increasingly diverse U.S. workplaces. The impact of this form of workplace violence on health and social services, education, and academia will be explored. Traditionally marginalized groups are most frequently the targets of this violence. This is not surprising, given that mobbing behavior builds from and reinforces prejudice (Davenport, Schwartz, & Elliott, 2002). Studies have confirmed the impact of gender but no studies have examined the impact of race and sexual orientation. Our presentation will be based on our initial stages of inquiry in which the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the targets and bullies are examined.
These behaviors and their impact will be examined and strategies for intervening at the individual and organizational levels will be presented, including systemic responses, which support the target, isolate the perpetrator, and break the cycle of abuse. Quick action by various stakeholders (Westhues, 1998) results in an end to the destructive behavior. Bullying and mobbing can be eliminated through environmental changes that build from peace building models and create organizational shifts that run counter to the offending behavior and toward the creation of a culture of respect.
The Rage to Control: A Comparative Approach to Bullying as a Symptom of Inoperative Communities
Evy Varsamopoulou
CRASSH & University of Cyprus, Cyprus
This paper will argue that the phenomenon of bullying relies for its persistence on its toleration by the communities in which it takes place. Toleration in the case of bullying is not merely to be understood as a weakness or limitation in the institutional contexts of liberal societies, but rather as a stance resulting from a number of variable causes, such as fear, indifference, individualism, personal interests, vicarious pleasure, repressed desire to bully, personal dislike of the ´target/victim´ of bullying, inability to judge for oneself and so on. Of these, the most insidious, it will be argued, is the feature of enjoyment and attraction to power that underlie what has been called ´mobbing´.
The focus context for this study will be the workplace; specifically, academic institutions of higher learning. This choice is based on two factors. Firstly there is the premise that relations between adults in the workplace is typically not one of friendship or intimacy, and thus not personal, but are governed by both official and tacit rules of behavior. Secondly, the choice of the academic workplace has to do with the increasing institutionalization and professionalization of the intellectual and scientist, who, in their role of teacher and researcher, are encouraged, if not expected, to embody a critical function in contemporary societies, especially within democratic republics. Consequently, the increasing, and/or increasingly documented, phenomenon of academic bullying is not merely an example of bullying that is context-specific, nor even just a sign of the multifaceted crisis of modern universities; more than these, it offers an analogy for the phenomenon of international bullying, in which nation-states, individually but with the support of a wider alliance (official or unofficial), function as índividuals ´ with (dis)respect to each other. The analogy is furthered by the use of a common (cover-up) enlightenment rhetoric of rights, justice, property, freedom and so on.
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