BROTHER SECRET, SISTER SILENCE:
SIBLING CONSPIRACIES AGAINST MANAGERIAL INTEGRITY
Dr William De Maria
UQ Business School,
The University of Queensland
St. Lucia, Brisbane, 4072
AUSTRALIA.
b.demaria@business.uq.edu.au
+61 7 33652640
Philosophical foundations
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BROTHER SECRET, SISTER SILENCE:
SIBLING CONSPIRACIES AGAINST MANAGERIAL INTEGRITY
ABSTRACT
I offer a new cartography of ethical resistance.
I argue that there is an uncharted
interaction between managerial secrecy and organizational silence, which may
exponentially increase the incidence of corruption in ways not yet understood. Current
methods used to raise levels of moral conduct in business and government practice appear
blind to this powerful duo. Extensive literature reviews of secrecy and silence scholarships
form the background for an early stage conceptual layout of the co-production of secrecy
and silence.
Key words. Organizational silence, secrecy, ethical resisters
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It is time for a fresh look at ethical resistance. Each new corruption scandal mocks
the methods we deploy to combat wrongdoing. Each new corruption scandal testifies that
men and women of goodwill, the ethical resisters, are not well served in their endeavors to
elevate the moral standards of management. In ramping up our responses to wrongdoing
we need to be a lot clearer about obstructions to ethical resistance. In this paper I draw
attention to the incapacitating effects of secrecy and silence on ethical resistance.
I
consider that secrecy and silence potently remain at the service of management wishing to
evade ethical obligations. Secrecy and silence may even be co-empowered by a high level
of conceptual and strategic integration.
Currently, there is a range of separate literatures in the public domain on the topics of
silence, and secrecy. Some of this literature, as in the case of silence, is a more recent
arrival. I first examine this literature in detail. To date, these writings have not considered
the implications of co-conceptualizing these concepts. I do so in this paper because secrecy
and silence may be synergistic, offering ethical resistance an extra dimension of
obstruction.
I contend that until we acknowledge the subtle, yet significant impacts of secrecy and
silence as barriers to ethical resistance we will: (1) continue to see the proliferation of
corruption and other unethical activities in both public and private sector organizations; and
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(2) the social and organizational change that the ethical resisters hope to bring about is less
likely to occur.
The paper concludes with compass bearings for research on what I see as the next
phase in the development of ethical management.
BROTHER SECRET
Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of the State. (Cardinal De Richelieu)
The profile of official secrecy is indeed disturbing; more so since the events in the
United States of America on September 11, 2001 (9/11) (Bird & Brandt, 2002; Rotenberg,
2002). It is said that over 3.5 million official secrets are created each year by government
agencies in the United States.
This works out at over 10,000 new secrets per day
(Thompson, 1999:181). Another estimate takes the level of official concealment to a new
and terrifying height. It is claimed that for 1996, close to 6 million decisions were made to
classify government documents as secret (Moynihan, 1998, pp.74-5. See also Neocleous,
2002, p.99). Yet business ethics scholarship has not been stimulated by these high levels of
official secrecy. Why is this? Part of the reason is that formal work structures are rarely
theorized as silent and secret places.
Secrecy Scholarship: Management’s Great Blind Spot
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The secrecy that is considered here is official secrecy: formal, conscious, and
calculated concealments by those in power, both in government and business, of
information that should be in the public arena; or at least circulating intra-organizationally
(Tefft, 1980, p.14). Thirty years ago it was said that social scientists had little interest in
secrecy systems in complex organizations (Sjoberg & Miller, 1973). Steele’s (1975) The
Open Organization was an early additive to the slow fermentation in the 1970s. In the next
decade the process quickened, with Tefft’s (1980) Secrecy: A Cross-Cultural Perspective;
Stevenson’s (1980) interest in secrecy in the business world; Bok’s (1982) seminal Secrets:
On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation; Robertson’s (1982) work on government
secrecy; and White’s (1986) bibliographical study. The pace increased again in the 1990s.
There was Ponting’s (1990) excellent memoir of his prosecution under the UK Official
Secrets Act; Eagles, Taggart and Liddell’s (1992) study of official secrecy in New Zealand;
Smyth and Hazelkorn’s (1993) analysis of secrecy and censorship; Merrrett’s (1995) study
of intellectual suppression in South Africa; Bunyan’s (1999) analysis of secrecy in the
European Union; and the report of the United States Commission on Protecting and
Reducing Government Secrecy (1997) in which it considered the effects of secrecy in
America during the Cold War.
By 2000, the literature was bubbling with activity in a range of scholarships that did
not include business ethics. We have Terrill’s (2000) study of official secrecy in the
Australian Government; Rozell’s (2002) consideration of the exploitation of executive
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privilege; and Petronio and Altman’s (2002) look at privacy. Nevertheless, there was a
twist. This new decade has seen the interest in secrecy largely detoured into impact
assessments of post 9/11 information policies on open government (Jones, 2001; Melanson
& Summers, 2001; Helms, 2003; Schmidt & Pound, 2003; Isikoff, 2004). It is possible that
this preoccupation with secrecy and national security will once again slow down research
into workplace secrecy cultures.
Secrecy scholarship is a garden of many flowers. Weber (1968) saw secrecy as a
natural aspect of bureaucratic life allowing the executive arm of government to administer
with minimal scrutiny. Teft (1980, p.50), on the other hand, explained secrecy through
conflict theory. Secrecy facilitates the formation and maintenance of conflict groups, and
their conflictual exchanges, because information is a critical resource that one group tries to
retain and the other group tries to capture.
Neocleous, an emerging British writer in State theory, provides a completely
different conception of secrecy. “What is shrouded” he says, by the cloak of secrecy, “is
nothing more then the essence of the State.” (Neocleous, 2002, p.3). Favoring Weber,
Neocleous says secrecy has little to do with national culture and more to do with the
material conditions of State power. If he is right, then we are indeed on the wrong course.
Liberal reformism, the ideological underpinning of much of management theory, locates
secrecy entrenched in the culture and seeks to eradicate it through administrative responses,
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such as FOI legislation. Neocleous (2002, p.7) sees this as naïve, as he contends that the
true host of secrecy is the State, which he argues is not some neutral vehicle affecting the
public interest, as liberal theory would have it. Instead, it is a subject within itself with its
own State interests to pursue (Neocleous, 2002, p.4).
In other words, for Neocleous
secrecy is so integral to State power that it can only be eliminated by the eradication of the
State.
The great American sociologist, Edward Shils, called the illegitimate use of official
secrecy, the “deformation of civility” (1956, p.153). Illegitimate secrecy, he so forcefully
argued, injures the public deliberation process by culling information vital to the
requirements of active citizenship (Colby, 1976). It allows those who govern with our
consent to bypass existing mechanisms of accountability.
In addition, secrecy keeps
improper acts of our elected and non-elected officials under a kind of permafrost. Shils
also saw secrecy placing a heavy strain on institutional relationships such as those between
open-focused media and closed-focused government (1956, p.153). Further, secrecy strains
the relationship between citizens and government, and among other things, leads to the
withdrawal of civic trust and the festering of conspiracy theories.
In endorsing Shils’ rueful analysis, Tefft (1980, p.66) takes us more into the
substance of this paper when he focuses squarely on how secrecy puts management in
harms way.
He sees it intensifying political rivalries, subverting the flow of vital
information up and down the hierarchy, hiding inefficiency, and stifling useful criticism
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and evaluations aimed at generating organizational change. The van Buitenen case that
follows illustrates these consequences. Moynihan (1998) connects with Teft through his
observation that excessive military secrecy actually extended the period that America was
in the Cold War because covert intelligence was not subjected to rigorous assessment.
Secrecy: A Permanent Business Reality?
Finally we should briefly consider what sustains secrecy. Secrecy is definitely not on
the wane. The contemporary worldwide reconfiguration of government-business relations,
referred to as a “global revolution” (Kettl 1993), is accelerating the growth of official
secrecy.
These restructurings have a uniform nature and are apparent in numerous
countries including Canada (Roberts, 2000); South Africa (Russell, 2001); Poland
(Krajewska, 1995); United Kingdom (Grimshaw, 2002); United States (Box, Marshall,
Reed & Reed, 2001) and Australia (Brown, Ryan & Parker, 2000; Walker & Walker,
2000).
Worldwide, an enormous amount of traditional government business is going over to
the private sector, or to government owned operations. The shrinkage of the service State
and the marketization of government services have meant that a huge amount of prior
government production and servicing is now conducted according to the disclosure-shy
protocols of business (Roberts, 2000; De Maria, 2001). In these circumstances secrecy is
amplified, as government-business enterprises and private companies on government
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contracts exploit escape routes from the accountability measures usually embedded in
administrative law (Allars, 1995; Freedland, 1995; Greenaway, 1995).
The second factor leading to secrecy’s contemporary amplification is national
insecurity. There is now abundant evidence that the clandestine operations of intelligence
and military services, and their business counterparts, constantly assail the norms of
democratic openness and accountability (Anonymous, 1990; Lardner, 1996; Coliver,
Hoffman, Fitzpatrick & Bowen, 1999; Snepp, 1999; Steele, 2000; Melanson & Summers,
2001). More to the point for this paper is the new evidence that non-military information is
now being managed as if it pertained to national security (Eisendrath, 2000; Neocleous,
2000; 2002; Dupont, 2002; Leger, 2002; Lewis, 2002). Secrecy’s grip is tightening.
Collectively this literature confirms a traditional intuition that people who mount
ethical challenges against organizations under the sway of Brother Secret struggle against
enormous informational asymmetries. Those who wish to oppose official policy or disclose
wrongdoing are forced to draw the donkey from an incomplete presentation of dots.
Secrecy leads to resister incapacity because activist strategies are deprived of the life blood
of information.
Silence is just as incapacitating as secrecy. In the next section the newly awakened
research interest in organizational silence is reviewed, with a focus on the explanatory
schemes put forward by Kelman and Hamilton (1989), Bird (1996), Milliken and Morrison
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(2000), and Beamish (2000). This will then put us on the road to co-conceptualizing
secrecy and silence.
SISTER SILENCE
Silence is the ultimate weapon of power. Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
Silence about wrongdoing is a far more active social behavior than whistleblowing,
as the silence-rates research (below) confirms. One remarkable example of silence concerns
the leakage of as much as 20 million gallons of petroleum by the Unocal Corporation into
Central California’s Guadalupe-Nipomno sand dunes.
This was possibly the largest
petroleum spill in United States’ history (Beamish, 2000, p.473). Contamination continued
unabated, despite the illegality of the practice being widely known. After 38 years of
spillage from under-maintained pipes, only two employees broke their silence and reported
the wrongdoing. One can only be awed at the way silence was perfectly normalized for so
long in that organization.
Like official secrecy, organizational silence has been of marginal interest to the
business ethics research community for too long. Hirschman’s (1970) classic, Exit, Voice
and Loyalty did not trigger any academic gold rush into the rich silence deposits. There
was some interest in the 1980s (Farrell, 1983; Graham, 1986; Spencer, 1986; Gordon,
Infante & Graham, 1988) which trailed off in the 1990s (Farrell & Rusblut, 1992). Studies
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are trickling into the record and starting to interrogate this important organizational shadow
reality.
As a result silence is starting to get a bad name. It has been implicated in the failure
of change management programs (Beer & Nohria, 2000) and managers’ negative attitudes
to change (Bowen & Blackmon, 2003). It is also seen as compromising the innovative
spirit (Nemeth, 1997; Edmondson, 2003); blocking critiques of management practice
(Shaw, 1981; Perlow & Williams, 2003); and maintaining illegal practices (Beamish,
2000). The list goes on. Silence preserves power differences (Bowen & Blackmon, 2003);
reduces levels of job satisfaction and work commitment (Rasbult, Farris, Rogers &
Mainous, 1988; Vakola & Dimitris, 2002); and encourages passivity and learned
helplessness (Premeaux & Bedeian, 2003). Researchers also point the finger at Sister
Silence for the existence of sexually intolerant workplaces (Bowen & Blackmon, 2003).
People remain silent for, inter alia; fear of being rejected and damaging work relationships
(Bowen & Blackmon, 2003); and of course the old chestnut, fear of reprisal (Milliken,
Morrison & Hewlin, 2003). In other words, silence has deep and troubling organizational
consequences, another feature it shares with secrecy.
____________________
Insert Table 1 about here
_____________________
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Table 1 summarizes the silence research record in the most general way. In the main,
results are based on respondent reactions to hypothetical situations; a problematical feature
shared with empirical whistleblower research, as already noted.
Some of the more
prominent findings from this collection are now briefly discussed. Rothschild and Miethe’s
study was the first to profile the silent observer (N=218). They found that silent observers
were older than external whistleblowers and had worked for their organizations about 2
years longer than colleagues who disclosed externally (1999, p.114). Sixty two percent of
silent observers also felt that their employers had strong values compared to 29% of
external whistleblowers. More silent observers (35%) felt that their organizations practiced
democratic decision making than did the external whistleblowers (13%). Silent observers
also felt that they had more opportunities to participate in these decisions (49%) than
external whistleblowers (22%). Rothschild and Miethe found no significant differences
between external whistleblowers and silent observers on; gender, marital status, education,
religion, income, seniority, sense of worth, and altruism.
Zipparo (1999) obtained high silence rates in her study of Australian public servants
(N=800). One of the questions was: “Imagine that you were aware of corruption in your
workplace and you thought that it should be reported. How might the factors below affect
your decision to make the report?” The factors and the connected silence rates are reproduced in Table 2. The “would be unlikely to make a report” and “would definitely not
make report” responses have been combined.
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___________________
Insert Table 2 about here
_____________________
Zipparo (1999, p.282) then sought to determine if any demographic factors predicted
whether a respondent would be deterred from reporting. Unlike Rothschild and Miethe
(1999) overall, gender, age, income, and supervisory status were found to be predictors of
silence. Females and non-supervisors were more likely to be deterred by the perception of
no legal protections against reprisals. Females, non-supervisors, and young respondents
(less than 45 years of age) were more likely to prefer the silence option in the absence of
anonymous reporting. Respondents under the age of 25 were more likely to be silenced
because of anxiety that their careers would be adversely affected if they disclosed. Nonsupervisors and lower income groups were silenced by the absence of a reporting procedure
to someone unknown. In addition, lower income groups were silenced by the lack of
support from an immediate supervisor, lack of confidence that their report would be taken
seriously, and the lack of formal reporting channels. Finally, females were more likely to
be silenced due to an uncertainty as to whether their CEO/GM encourages reporting.
Between February 1999 and June 2000, the United States National Institute of Ethics
carried out what was described as the “most extensive research ever conducted on the
police code of silence” (Trautman, 2000). Three thousand seven hundred and fourteen
officers and police academy recruits were sampled. The recruit sub-sample (1017) revealed
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79% who acknowledged the existence of a code of silence and 52% who were not bothered
by its existence. Of the officer sub-sample (2698), 46% said they had witnessed colleague
wrongdoing but took no action. These are chilling figures, telling us that the culture of
silence is an awesomely powerful organizational reality with a cockroach’s resilience.
Silence Scholarship
Four significant contributors to the silence literature are now reviewed as a
foundation for the following section in which secrecy and silence are co-conceptualized.
Morrison and Milliken’s (2000) stylish contribution centers on the identification of
contextual variables that are conducive to silence.
Their tantalizing propositions are
summarized in the following table.
__________________
Insert Table 3 about here
____________________
Such summarization, particularly in tabulated form, runs the risk of inaccurately
reporting Morrison and Milliken. With that caution in mind, we can see from their analysis
an outspread range of work culture issues that encourage silence (left column). I have
added a counter-positioned range of work culture issues that may encourage
whistleblowing and protest (right column). Morrison and Milliken see organizational
silence as a “collective” phenomenon. They ground the question “why silence?” in the
sociology of the workplace, not the psychology of individual workers. Employees detect
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through the organizational climate whether speaking up is devalued and dangerous, or
valued and safe (Morrison & Milliken, 2000, p.714).
Having laid out this case, Morrison and Milliken (2000, p.719) consider two
consequences of silence on organizational change: (1) reduction of the range of inputs
available to decision makers; and (2) the blockage of negative feedback. However, their
work misses, or does not give due emphasis to other factors behind silence. The authors are
right to emphasize organizational impediments to voice, as opposed to psychological
impediments; but there are also extra-organizational factors operating which lead to silence.
Zipparro’s (1999) study (see above) reported a 57% silence rate on the basis that the wouldbe whistleblower does not have the support of family. Other studies also point to the
importance of extra-organizational factors in influencing the silence-patterns of workers.
For example, the absence of countermanding ethical authorities, as one finds in professional
associations’ codes of conduct (Perrucci, Anderson, Schendel & Trachtman, 1980, p.162).
There appears to be an implication in Morrison and Milliken’s work that a significant
proportion of any workforce would use one voice strategy or another if it was not for the
organizational barriers that encourage silence. But what of the careerist? Maybe this is an
entirely different group of people than those intimidated into silence. The “career” is
planned, trained for, and indulged with massive injections of time and other resources
(Broscio & Scherer, 2003; Reitman, 2003). Strange as it may sound, the “career” carries its
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own ethical position based on the self-interested individual, and a moral end in its own
right.
This Hobbesian view is sweetened up for us through the language of
professionalism, which implies, often falsely, a wider social responsibility. The point is
that the “career” may possibly stop voice as effectively as the organizational and
psychological barriers we have been examining.
Finally, Morrison and Milliken, like their colleagues doing the empirical
whistleblower research, did not consider official secrecy. In fairness, theirs was not an
exhaustive study of the silence area. However, its absence in their work does demonstrate
that secrecy continues to evade contemporary research attention, although tabloid polemics
on secrecy are at deluge levels.
One of the pioneering authors in the organizational silence area, not mentioned in the
Morrison and Milliken study, is Frederick Bird (1996), whose work The Muted Conscience:
Moral Silence and the Practice of Ethics in Business is a solid contribution to the field.
Bird examines individual, cultural, and organizational causes of silence. He says the
“muted conscience’ takes three forms; (1) moral silence, (2) moral deafness, and (3) moral
blindness. People are morally mute when they “do not recognizably communicate their
moral concerns in settings where such communicating would be fitting” (p.27). They are
morally deaf when they “do not hear and do not respond to moral issues that have been
raised by others” (p.55). Finally, people are morally blind “when they fail to see or
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recognize moral concerns and expectations that bear upon their activities and
involvements” (p.85).
As with Morrison and Milliken, hierarchies are also culpable in Bird’s analysis when
canvassing the causes of silence. So too are what he calls “excessive barriers to horizontal
communications” (1996, p.182). He sees six consequences of silence; (1) moral concerns
not addressed; (2) accountability systems become dysfunctional; (3) moral stress increases;
(4) moral development is impeded; (5) management control and scrutiny increases; and (6)
the role of ethics is marginalized and confused (pp.125-140).
Kelman and Hamilton (1989) take a social psychological approach to the question of
silence in the face of amoral authority. While authority’s suppression of voice is a common
research concern, Kelman and Hamilton offer a fresh approach by focusing on the My Lai
massacre during the Vietnam War. The silences that Kelman and Hamilton are talking
about go beyond the routine obedience prescribed in military law and traditions. Yet they
are not only interested in silences that are accompanied by very heavy consequences, such
as massacres, which the authors refer to as “crimes of obedience.” Their analysis of
militarized consent is extendable to all forms of organizationally-induced silence.
Like Morrison and Milliken (2000), Kelman and Hamilton (1988, p.77) appreciate
the macro nature of their field of study. They see authority squarely as a property of social
structure.
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This is important, as we remain interested in the practices of a silencing
management rather than the micro behavior of the silenced worker. Kelman and Hamilton’s
dissection of authority reveals a mode of influence that is legally sanctioned by laws,
regulations, and official determinations (1988, p.137). What is also sanctioned is the use of
coercion to extract compliance and the provision of punishment for disobedience. Given
the power of this mode of influence, the only way to question it is morally, which is where
ethical resisters come in. Ethical resistance is made even more dangerous because those
who would act morally are up against sources of power that have both the legal right to
exercise authority and the capacity to demand compliance.
We can draw from this the proposition that ethical resisters must both step outside the
reigning organizational world-view and redefine it as illegal, or immoral, or both; and they
must question authority. A logical extension of this position is that in ethical resisters we
are dealing with special groups in the community. Both have rejected traveling in orbits of
authority controlled by management and the State.
Beamish’s (2000) analysis of why silence prevailed for so long on the GuadalupeNipomno oil fields (see above) finalizes the scan of important contemporary contributions
to organizational silence scholarship. Like the scholars considered above, Beamish gives
precedence to organizational culture as a concept that possesses great explanatory power
when asking the question “why silence?” His special contribution lies in the fact that he
tracked the oil company through a significant paradigm, or sense-making shift. In the first
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paradigm, spilling oil was deemed unimportant. In the second paradigm, after
environmental laws were enacted, spilling oil was no longer acceptable – it was illegal. It
is worth mentioning that this paradigm shift was not sufficient in itself to stop the spillage.
While objectively assessed as illegal, the oil spillers could not comprehend the spillage as
being morally wrong. In explaining silence in the second paradigm, Beamish effectively
rounds up some unusual suspects; hierarchy (allowing insulation from responsibility),
promotion (to those who managed the conspiracy of silence), recruitment (only of those
with a detectable propensity for organizational obedience) and the normalization of
deviancy.
In summarizing thus far, people freely or forcibly consent to conceal information that
should be in the public arena through silence. They have absorbed corporate sense-making
frameworks and rituals that normalize concealment (Vaughan, 1996, p.409). Work
hierarchies then absolve employees from any moral culpability; particularly those lower
ranked workers close to the wrongdoing action (Beamish, 2000). When secrecy
accumulates, it becomes a ‘culture of silence’.
In the following section I draw down research insights considered so far, to explore,
through the prism of a single case, synergistic potentials between the siblings, brother
secret and sister silence.
THE CO-PRODUCTION OF SECRECY AND SILENCE
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Does it make theoretical sense to talk about the co-production of secrecy and silence?
If it does then it raises the bar for ethical resisters. Not only must they deal with these
organizational realities separately, they must also respond to secrecy that has had its power
exponentially increased by its association with silence, and vice versa. I have explored the
research that has separately located secrecy and silence at the scene of the crime
(corruption and mismanagement). We must go beyond that thinking.
From the research reviewed here we can gather the crucial insight that secrecy and
silence, as separate phenomena, are properties of formal structures. They are not the
personal prerogatives of managers; nor are they abnormal fixtures. At this point in time
resister experience outpaces this literature. From the anecdotal record we glean that ethical
resisters never meet secrecy and silence separately. For them it is a co-joined experience,
as the following case should exemplify. This case was chosen because it is one of the few
that speak to both secrecy and silence.
Paul van Buitenen was a Brussels based assistant auditor with the European
Commission (EC).
In that capacity, he discovered serious financial wrongdoing and
reported internally to his superiors. In December 1998, disillusioned with official EC
reporting channels, he sent a 34-page letter (plus 600 pages of reference material) to Magda
Aelvoet, President of the Green Party in the European Parliament. “It is with deep regret
that I write this letter to you,” he began. “As a Commission official, I am not allowed
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under the staff regulations to address myself directly to the European Parliament on internal
Commission matters. This subject, however, appears to surpass what could normally be
designated ‘internal’ since the credibility and future of the Commission is at stake.” (van
Buitenen, 2001).
Van Buitenen’s report showed among other things, deliberate cover-ups of multimillion pound frauds and blocked inquiries into financial irregularities involving vast sums
of taxpayers’ money. In March 1999, after his allegations were independently confirmed,
the entire EC Commission resigned (van Buitenen, 2000). In 2002, van Buitenen left the
EC, declaring that nothing had changed (BBC, 2002).
Van Buitenen’s unqualified vindication allows us to confidently draw on his account
of the organizational climate at the EC prior to his disclosure. It was a culture of secrecy
and silence. The scandals that van Buitenen exposed lived long in that clandestine and
voice-muted system. In Bird’s words, (see above) EC personnel were morally silent, blind,
and deaf. There was little in van Buitenen’s work culture that encouraged voice and
openness.
As we have noted, secrecy and silence puts organizations in harms way.
Morrison and Milliken believe that silence causes, inter alia, a restriction in the variance of
informational inputs available to decision makers (2000, p.719).
Silence cut EC
administration off from evolving notions of governance, specifically the more active
participation of wider communities of stakeholders (Shapiro 2001). The EC’s detachment
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from these new trends in governance was extreme. Until the reforms stimulated by van
Buitenen, the EC had never, in its 50-odd year history, examined its operating procedures!
Van Buitenen was up against an anachronistic bureaucratic culture at the EC that had
been informed by a combination of Napoleonic and Germanic public administration values,
with the former particularly privileging elite solidarity, hierarchy, codification and
centralization (Stevens & Stevens, 2001: Levy, 2003, p.555). Each one of these is silence
and secrecy inducing, and has been noted by Morrison & Millikin (see Table 3). It seems
that these organizational climates can just as easily produce silence as they can produce
secrecy. Once this happens they reinforce each other.
Consider van Buitenen journey to outspokenness. This journey is always on two
fronts; a point rarely acknowledged in the literature. Van Buitenen had to simultaneously
disarm the pressures on him to remain silent and then confront and breach EC secrecy
protocols. The silence rate research considered above shows what a unique effort this was.
He was exposed to intense informal and formal pressures to secure his self-censorship.
Informal conformist pressures, active in daily work exchanges, would, for example, have
carried horror stories of what happened to previous colleagues who had broken the codes of
silence and secrecy. Formal pressures would have been visible in EC edicts regulating
classification and flow of information. Van Buitenen’s action represents a rare breakaway
from the clasps of organizational silence and official secrecy.
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We can encapsulate this discussion with a number of testable propositions:
1. Secrecy and silence are properties of all organizations
2. Secrecy and silence pose separate threats to the efficacy of ethical resistance.
3.
Secrecy and silence co-serve organizational interest. As such they are
synergic.
4. Secrecy and silence’s threats to ethical resistance escalate, perhaps
exponentially, when they become synergic.
5. The ethical resister’s journey is always on two fronts; disarming the pressures
to remain silent and collecting incriminating information despite an
organizationally-imposed blackout.
6. Ethical resisters are exposed to intense informal and formal pressures to
remain silent about wrongdoing and to respect secrecy protocols.
7. Ethical resistance will never secure enduring anti-corruption outcomes against
systems with silence and secrecy at their disposal.
8. Open styles of management guarantee voice and group mobilization.
9. Closed styles of management foster organizational silence and obsequious
attitudes to secrecy.
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With these propositions in mind, there is a need to design innovative research that
locates real-life management practices that foster openness and value voice, and compare
those practices to management that administers through high levels of secrecy and
intimidation.
We need to determine specific ways that the secrecy-silence dualism
invalidates voice and group mobilization; and whether, and how, open styles of
management encourages voice and group mobilization. An interesting side-road to this
venture could be researching organizations which commit to voice and mobilization to see
whether they achieve traditional business goals (growth, profit, and efficiency) better than,
or as well as, organizations which repudiate voice and mobilization (Argyres & Mui, 1999).
Of course we need conceptual conversations that challenge the main premise of this
paper. Are secrecy and silence synergistic, or do they extract their tolls only in independent
and co-incidental ways?
In this paper, I have briefly considered the issue of the legitimization of silence and
secrecy. We could do with a great deal more understanding of how these climates so
steadfastly embed themselves in workplaces; and how worker’s compliance to their
acceptance is secured. Insights from Rothschild and Miethe’s (1999) work, referred to
above, suggest that silence can be a willing behavior, an artifact of voluntary compliance
with a managerial culture of conformity, and it can also be the result of a campaign of fear.
How management presses its rule through consent and compliance is a fascinating area
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waiting to be researched. The role of secrecy in achieving these different outcomes makes
the research endeavor even more interesting.
Ethical resistance to corruption and other forms of wrongdoing are constantly foiled
by official secrecy and workplace silence; the high-octane fuels that illegitimate power runs
on. We have much to learn about these obstacles to ethical resistance.
25
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TABLE 1
Silence Research
Research
Year
Sample
Silence rate %
US Merit Systems Protection Board
1981
8000
70
US Merit Systems Protection Board
1984
5000
69
260
+70
13000
91.5
Ryan
&
Oestreich
(cited
in 1991
Morrison & Milliken, 2000: 706707)
US Merit Systems Protection Board 1993
35
(cited in Rothschild & Miethe,
1999: 112)
Wenger, Korenman, Berk & Liu
1993-94
697
50
Gorta & Forell
1995
1313
5-25
Zipparo
1999
800
25-82
Trautman
1999-2000
3714
46
761
38
Rothschild
&
Miethe
(national 1999
survey)
Rothschild & Miethe (State survey)
1999
326
52
Vakola & Dimitris
2002
677
Not recorded
TABLE 2
Zipparo’s Reasons for Silence
Deterrent
Silence Rate %
No legal proof
82
No legal protection from reprisals
76
Don’t know of anyone to trust to make report
71
Not sure identity would be kept confidential
65
Not sure if report will be taken seriously
61
36
Don’t have the support of family
58
Career may be adversely affected
57
No formal channels for reporting
55
Can’t make an anonymous report
53
Not convinced that making report will stop corruption
53
Don’t have support of work colleagues
50
Don’t have the support of immediate supervisor
49
Not sure if CEO/GM encourages reports
44
Don’t have option to report to someone unknown
37
Don’t think it part of work role to report
29
Corruption does not directly affect you
25
TABLE 3
Milliken & Morrison’s Reasons for Silence
Organizational Silence
Organizational Whistleblowing & Protest
Managers from financial or economic Managers from different backgrounds
backgrounds
Management
team
is
uniform
in Managers are a diverse group
backgrounds
Managers value hierarchies and harmony
37
Management values democratic decision-
making and protest
High level of difference (e.g. gender, age) Lower
between management and employees
level
of
difference
between
management and employees
Management emphasis on control and Management’s embracement of control and
efficiency
efficiency less emphatic
Organization operates in low-munificence Organization is relatively resource abundant
environment
Organization is in a stable industrial sector
Organization in newer and more volatile
area (e.g. Internet)
Senior managers hired from outside the Senior managers make their way through the
organization
organization
Organization relies heavily on contract labor
Organization gets the job done with it’s own
staff
Organizational structure has centralized Management devolves decision making
decision making
Organizational structure less likely to have Management fosters formal feedback from
formal upward feedback mechanisms
below
Management reacts negatively to feedback Management encourages feedback from
and less likely to solicit it
38
subordinates
Mid to lower level employees able to Mid to lower level employees enjoy wide
directly interrelate.
39
and dense social interactions at work