The Sociology of Whistleblowing

This book views the whistleblower as a key character in democratic societies. It argues that whistleblowing is likely to become an increasingly important form of action in the coming years. Whistleblowers are unique actors in our democracies because they disclose wrongdoing from the inside, as organization employees. With their privileged access and specialized knowledge, they contribute powerfully to public, democratic, and moral debates in a way that no one else can. The book explores whistleblowers’ relation to democracy by connecting them to values such as suspicion, openness, honesty, and critique. While anchored in a cultural sociological tradition, the book draws on several different sociological thinkers such as Niklas Luhmann, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu. Themes in the book include the democratic history of the whistleblower, normalized wrongdoing in organizations, the place of whistleblowers in popular culture, and Big Tech whistleblowing. This book will be of interest to readers in fields including political sociology, public sociology, the sociology of work, and organization studies.

Thomas Olesen is a professor of political sociology at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, and director of the Center for University Studies in Journalism at Aarhus University. His key research interest is the role of critique, suspicion, and disclosure in democratic societies.