ABSTRACT

Why has psychological violence emerged as a costly feature of contemporary workplaces across multiple sectors? Much of the last three decades of research on this question has had a functionalist orientation describing characteristics of victims and of perpetrators, antecedent conditions, individual and organisational ramifications, and public costs. As noted by Chappell and Di Martino (2006), workplace violence is a complex problem with grounding in economic, industrial, cultural and organizational factors that are not simply the result of particular problematic individuals. Attention has also been given to the dynamics or interplay of these factors and more recently to the promotion of recipes for reducing the risk of such violence. Through theorizing, gathering empirical evidence and analysis, these contributions have individually and collectively made a significant contributions to finding some answers to the question of why abuse has become so prevalent. There is, however, an argument that to understand the origin, influence and persistence of these risk or contributory factors it is necessary to trace

back to a legacy of politics, power and internal and external alliances. Adopting this perspective does not (nor is it intended to) diminish the relevance of the functionalist factors identified by researchers, but rather it takes the position that without challenging the instrumental nature of political discourse, the power relations and the alliances, the best that interventions will achieve will be momentary and transitory.