ABSTRACT

Sexual harassment is occasionally very serious; more often it is trivial. Primary claims-makers, as Joel Best calls them, initially "define a social problem to their own satisfaction and then present their claims in a fashion likely to draw media attention." Thereafter, the media, by focusing on the problem's most dramatic features, transform the primary claims into secondary claims. This chapter focuses on the claim that sexual harassment is an organizational and managerial problem, not a people problem. Here is an example of the sort of "complex" awareness for which Susan Hippensteele is arguing: "Strategies that deal with sexual harassment as a unidimensional phenomenon and deny the experiences of victims who are subject to multiple forms of oppression cannot be effective for those persons". The real need in the sexual harassment literature is for help in distinguishing between egregious cases of harassment and the ordinary complexities of human relations, in the workplace and the academy.