ABSTRACT

Whistleblowing, or the act of speaking up with concerns or information about wrongdoing inside organizations and institutions, can be one of the most important and difficult forms of heroism in modern society. In a complex world where power, decision-making and the lives and work of citizens are tied up with the good governance of public and corporate institutions, the everyday people inside organizations are often the best placed to tell the truth about what went wrong after a disaster-or, even better, to sound the alarm before poor, risky or corrupt practices take hold, and so limit corruption or avert tragedy. But while some whistleblowers can be accurately identified as heroes, is this true of all? Should

whistleblowing be classed as always, or generally, a heroic act or process? Why are key social actors, from the media to whistleblowing advocacy groups, so ready to tag whistleblowers as heroes? How useful is this tag when it comes to fully understanding and valuing the vital role that whistleblowing plays in political life, as well as to encouraging and protecting whistleblowers? This chapter dives behind the familiar stereotype of whistleblower as hero, to unpack some of the dilemmas associated with how whistleblowing is, and should be, characterized. These dilemmas revolve especially around the fact that often, as a process, whistleblowing is (or should be) more “normal” than it is “exceptional” in modern institutional life. I will argue that unlike some and perhaps most other forms of heroism, the unexceptional nature of much whistleblowing, the complexity of its motivations, and the options for best recognizing it, can all combine to make the “hero-whistleblower” stereotype as much a hindrance as a help in shaping public discourse, policy, and legal and institutional responses. By reviewing when and why we tend to identify whistleblowers as heroes, and analyzing this

in relation to growing research into whistleblowing behavior and processes, including social attitudes and the self-images of whistleblowers, we can begin to identify a more nuanced approach to identifying what is (or can be) heroic about whistleblowing, and what may not be, or isn’t, or is better not depicted in heroic terms even when it is. The first part of the chapter reviews some of the background of what we know about whistleblowing, and when and how heroism becomes associated with it, in order to flesh out the tensions that this association creates for policy choices about how whistleblowing is best recognized. The second part reviews evidence of social attitudes towards whistleblowing in order to provide some new anchors for how the relationship between heroism and whistleblowing should be approached, including results from a large self-selecting sample of whistleblowers, potential whistleblowers and nonwhistleblowers, collected through the World Online Whistleblowing Survey (WOWS). In

conclusion, given the counterproductive effects that can flow from misrepresentation of all or most whistleblowing as “totally” heroic, these analyses support the need to promote whistleblowing as a “quiet” or everyday form of heroism, recognizing that much of it can and should begin and end with little or no heroism at all.